Returnity has received funding of $3.1mm in a seed round led by Austin-based Brand Foundry Ventures, with additional investments from XRC Labs and other angel investors. Brand Foundry has a strong track record of investing at the earliest stages in category-defining brands like Allbirds, Olipop, and Starface. With their success comes the opportunity to help brands rethink how they ship and deliver products to customers. Returnity solves for just that, enabling their consumer-facing brand portfolio to create sustainable and customer-centric logistics solutions.
With 100B global parcel deliveries a year, and over 200B by 2026, the environmental impact is undeniable. In the U.S. alone, it’s enough packaging to pave a mile-wide cardboard road from NYC to LA and back – three times over.
Companies can consider reusable packaging to combat these costs and plan for 2022 and beyond. With a 95.5% return rate, the average Returnity bag or box can be used for 20 customer shipments. Returnity’s focused process identifies high-return rate opportunities for clients and is now being used for over 500K shipments a month, expanding to 2 million shipments a month in Q3 2022.
Led by CEO Mike Newman, the Brooklyn-based company replaces single-use shipping and delivery packaging by designing, manufacturing and implementing reusable packaging and circular logistics systems. Customers include Estée Lauder, New Balance, Rent the Runway, Walmart and others. Returnity won the 2021 Beyond the Bag Challenge, the 2019 National Geographic Ocean Plastic Innovation Challenge and was highlighted in the DHL 2019 and 2020 Trend Research Reports.
Mike is a leading expert in transformational logistics platforms from single-use to circularity, reducing the mountains of plastics and corrugated cardboard entering our waste stream while saving millions in packaging expenses. He received his MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Over the last 20+ years he worked at the intersection of supply chain and sustainability, including directing the Sierra Club’s political operations in 20 states and building e-waste programs for companies such as Verizon, Walmart and Best Buy as the Sales and Marketing Vice President for ReCellular.
Returnity customer case studies
- Walmart: Returnity supplies reusable bags optimized for home grocery delivery service and manages the cleaning and resupply of the packaging.
- New Balance: Returnity leads reusable shipping packaging deployment for the New Balance Team Sports initiative, creating an efficient and environmentally-friendly system to ship samples to and from partners.
- Aveda: They’ve partnered with Returnity to create their Returnable Shipper Program specifically for Aveda’s one-litre bottles. Each Returnable Shipper can be reused up to 20 times or more, helping to reduce corrugate packaging weight by at least 89%.
- Happy Returns | FedEx: Happy Returns revolutionizes how goods are moved between stores and warehouses with their Return Bar network. With Returnity, shoppers can exchange and return e-commerce items without printing, packaging, or person-to-person contact. Returnity designs and manufactures the packaging used for all Happy Returns logistics, powering tens of thousands of shipments per week.
- Izzy: Returnity supplies reusable shipping bags for Izzy, the world’s first zero-waste mascara brand. Note the brand was recently included in the Good Housekeeping 2021 Sustainable Innovation Awards.