Trove
Co-founded Trove (formerly Yerdle), a B2B resale platform that enables major brands including Patagonia and Lululemon to sell used products. The company has raised $122.5M in funding and operates a marketplace with over 1 million members.
The idea behind Trove came before most boardrooms were talking about circular commerce. In 2012, it was already obvious that huge volumes of good products were ending up in landfills while resale demand was growing on platforms brands did not control.
The question was whether major brands could run their own resale marketplaces. Instead of a Patagonia customer discarding a jacket or selling it on a third-party site, what if Patagonia itself could take it back, authenticate it, and resell it? The brand would keep the customer relationship, and the customer would get a reason to participate.
The hard part was not the concept. It was the operations. Processing used goods at scale requires reverse logistics, authentication, grading, dynamic pricing, and integrations that traditional e-commerce systems were never built to handle. Solving that took years.