🌐 The $1.9 Trillion Opportunity in Circular Retail

Fifteen years ago, I entered a nondescript building in eastern Pennsylvania and saw the future.

In front of me were hundreds of autonomous robots moving in harmony across a massive warehouse floor—delivering diapers, cleaning products, and all sorts of household goods to humans at packing stations along the edge of the building.

This was Quidsi, an e-commerce company best known for Diapers.com and Soap.com. Amazon had recently acquired the company. Its founders, Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara, hired me to lead our expansion into natural, organic, and sustainably made products, which would eventually become Vine.com.

The robots were simply mesmerizing.

Off to the side, though, I noticed a giant pile of products splayed out without nearly the same precision. Expensive baby strollers. Car seats. All sorts of products that had been sent back.

I asked one of the managers what they were going to do with all the returned merchandise.

Some of it, he said, would go to a liquidator.

A lot of it would just get thrown away.

That’s the invisible waste built into retail, a system that is broken.

You can have all the robots in the warehouse you want. You can optimize the first sale endlessly. But to build a circular economy, you have to solve for the pile in the corner.

And that pile keeps getting bigger and bigger. Today, it stands at nearly $1.9 trillion globally: $800 billion in returns and $1.1 trillion in excess production and seasonal surplus.

That’s the problem Rich Amsinger and Carolyn Butler have been working on for years.

None of this was obvious when their journey as startup co-founders began in 2020, sitting on a bedroom floor, packing away clothes their daughter had already outgrown and thinking: this is so wasteful.

That pain and the subsequent insights led to Borobabi, a business built around keeping kids’ clothes in circulation rather than sitting in closets or getting tossed in landfills. Then came Manymoons, which expanded beyond kids’ clothing to offer premium, high-quality, sustainable, and ethically made goods at discounted prices—building what the company calls America’s first circular retailer.

Now that work has evolved again into ManyCo: the technology infrastructure behind it all.

The company’s core belief is simple: if you make something, it should be used by someone.

And that belief has pushed Rich and Carolyn toward a much bigger retail problem: what happens after a brand has taken its first shot at selling a product.

The returns. The overstock. The excess inventory. The products that still have value, but no obvious path back into the market.

ManyCo is built for that moment.

The company uses AI, logistics, and its own sales channels to help brands figure out what that inventory is worth, where it should go, and how to recover more value from it while keeping more products in use.

Rich calls it post-primary commerce. What sets ManyCo apart from other companies in recommerce is that it isn’t just a software layer or backend logistics platform. The company also does the truly hard part: selling products through Manymoons, marketplaces, bundles, and pop-ups—whatever path makes sense for a specific brand and product.

Many retailers, brands, and tech companies talk about circularity. Few are willing to take on the operational complexity and market risk required to make it work.

That’s exactly what ManyCo and Manymoons are built to do.

Rich joined me to discuss what it takes to make the circular economy just “the economy.”

Here’s what stood out from our conversation.

The moat isn’t selling products. It’s the data that selling provides.

“You can build all the technology you want, but unless you’re in the business of selling stuff, it’s not really worth your time.”

ManyCo sees both sides of the transaction. It knows the product, the channel, the price, the customer, and the outcome. That gives ManyCo the complete data set it needs to keep improving its predictions of what inventory is worth, where it should go, and how it should be sold.

If you make something, it should be used by someone.

“We believe that all products should stay in use. If you make something, it should be used by someone. That’s our core belief.”

Once a product doesn’t sell, is returned, or comes back slightly damaged, a brand’s retail system starts treating it less like an asset and more like a headache.

ManyCo is built around the opposite idea: useful products should stay in circulation, and brands should have a smarter way to retain their value.

Quality matters even more after the first sale.

“If you just change the way you make products, the other side of this thing—the part that you’re not trying to sell, like your excess, your returns and your resale—you’ll make way more money over here.”

Better materials and better product construction don’t just create a better primary sale. They preserve value after the first sale.

Natural fibers are easier to clean. Better-made goods are easier to repair, easier to resell, and more attractive to customers even after they’ve already been through one retail cycle.

Circularity is more than a “values” proposition; it’s a value proposition.

There isn’t just one channel for excess inventory.

“The reason we call it ManyCo is because there are many ways of selling this excess inventory. It’s not just one lane.”

ManyCo is built on the idea that excess inventory doesn’t move through one channel. It moves through many to derive optimal results depending on the brand, the product, the season, and numerous other factors built into the company’s post-primary commerce optimization engine.

Brands want control. ManyCo lets them set the conditions.

“He creates the rails… and then our AI is basically guiding that individual on where we think we can sell it and how we would sell it.”

One of the biggest fears brands have around liquidation and off-price is loss of control. ManyCo’s model is built to preserve it.

Brands using the platform decide how much discounting they will tolerate, where they want or don’t want products indexed online, and how aggressively they want inventory moved.

ManyCo then builds the strategy around those rules.

The hard part is still the hard part.

“A lot of companies want to solve for circularity in consumer products by offering technology. But no one wants to take on the risk and do the hard part of actually selling stuff.”

Many companies want the software economics. ManyCo went through the operational pain themselves to understand how to deliver it.

Rich and Carolyn opened stores. Built logistics. Took product in themselves. Cleaned it. Repaired it. Sold it. Even composted it. And turned all of that firsthand experience into a system other brands can now use.

🌐 Supercool Takeaway

Indigo didn't build a carbon company. They built the infrastructure layer that makes regenerative agriculture economically rational for farmers and operationally reliable for the corporations that depend on them. When environmental and business risks are the same, urgency follows. That's the unlock.

Operator Takeaways

Circular retail stops being an aspiration the moment someone is willing to take possession of the goods, market them, and sell them.

Sell to learn.
If you want better data, better AI, and better strategy, start by actually selling the product. That’s how the moat gets built.

Design for the second sale.
Better materials and better product construction are quaint ideals. They’re strategies that preserve value across returns, resale, and overstock.

Build for multiple distribution channels.
Post-primary inventory doesn’t have a single elegant path to the resale consumer. The operating advantage comes from knowing what to sell, where, and how fast.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

The $1.9 Trillion Opportunity in Circular Retail

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, and all other platforms.

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Where Supercool Traveled This Week

PODCASTS

Big Thinker Universe: Josh Dorfman: Why the Economics of Climate Innovation are Finally Winning

Flywheel Leadership: Planting Inspiration- The Lazy Environmentalist with Josh Dorfman, Supercool

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