The way brands and retailers buy and vend off-price apparel, footwear and accessories may have just gotten simpler with the intro of retail tech innovator Inturn’s newest software solution.
With the B2B platform, brands and retailers can buy and sell excess inventory in a private marketplace with detailed product information, tailored transaction rules and analytics to evaluate the inventory.
“Brands have been selling their excess inventory to retailers in linear fashion using Excel spreadsheets for too long. It’s archaic and massively inefficient,” said Inturn CEO and co-founder Ronen Lazar. Most buyers have been handcuffed to buying what they are offered not what they want. And because selling off price is a by-product of their core business, brands end up selling to buyers who may not be the optimal buyers for their inventory. This is costing both sides billions of dollars a year. We built Inturn to save brands and buyers time, hassle, and money.”
According to the company, roughly $250 billion of off-price apparel inventory is sold globally each year, and inefficient manual methods of yesteryear are leading to delays in offering product for sale and limiting the number of buyers privy to the product. As a result, brands are adversely impacted by unnecessary discounts, leading to billions in lost revenue and most off-price buyers don’t properly evaluate the inventory they are looking to buy.
Inturn partnered with Beanstalk Ventures, a new seed investment firm launched by Bluefly founder Ken Seiff and Novel TMT, the technology investment arm of Silas Chou.
The company recently completed a $3.6 million capital raise led by retail technology investor Kristen Green of Forerunner Ventures and included Novel TMT Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Bobby Lent co-founder of Ariba, T5 Capital and original investor Beanstalk Ventures.
“This is the last frontier untouched by retail technology. While nearly every aspect of the retail experience has been automated, the sale of off-price inventory remains a very manual and inefficient process,” said Ken Seiff, managing partner of Beanstalk Ventures.
Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, added, “The team at Inturn has brought to life an incredibly powerful platform that stands to reshape the multibillion dollar global off-price apparel market and beyond.”