[SaaS Series] Revolutionizing Retail Sustainability With Andy Ruben of Trove

Andy Ruben is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Trove, a re-commerce technology company that powers branded resale programs for major labels like Patagonia, Lululemon, REI, and Levi’s. Before Trove, he spent a decade at Walmart as the company’s first Chief Sustainability Officer, where he launched global sustainability efforts, led omnichannel and private-brand strategies, and integrated e‑commerce — including the rollout of grocery delivery.

Ruben founded Trove (originally Yerdle) in 2012 and introduced the first branded resale platform with Patagonia’s Worn Wear in 2017, helping advance the circular economy across more than 150 global brands. He advises BCG and Earthshot Ventures, serves as Lead Independent Director and ESG Committee Chair at Zevia, and has been featured on NPR, TED, and testified before Congress on sustainable business practices.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:43] Andy Ruben discusses why Trove makes it easy for brands to reclaim and resell used items
• [06:55] How re-commerce boosts brand loyalty and customer retention
• [08:34] The original concept of Yerdle and its peer-to-peer item lending model
• [12:56] Lessons learned from early competitors like ThredUp and Poshmark
• [14:50] The pivotal moment when Trove shifted from a consumer platform to B2B resale infrastructure
• [17:17] The emotional and operational challenges of downsizing and pivoting Trove
• [18:29] Andy’s persistence in securing brand partnerships
• [23:01] The evolution of Trove’s technology to integrate directly into brand websites and logistics
• [26:23] How consumers trade in used items at Lululemon and receive gift cards in 30 seconds
• [29:16] Why Andy would change his business development approach by staying more founder-led
• [36:57] Tips for scaling a business

In this episode…

Most brands sell products once and lose the customer until their next full-price purchase — often years later. In today’s economy, that leaves businesses vulnerable to rising acquisition costs, volatile supply chains, and growing consumer demand for sustainability. So, how can companies reclaim the value of their products, strengthen customer relationships, and stay competitive in the circular economy?

Andy Ruben, a sustainability expert and retail pioneer, shares how brands can tap into the hidden inventory in customers’ closets by implementing buy-back and resale systems. He explains how branded resale builds loyalty and trust, reduces acquisition costs, and attracts new customers. He emphasizes the importance of starting small, using technology to streamline trade-ins, and designing programs that reinforce the brand’s core values. Andy also reflects on his entrepreneurial journey, including hard-earned lessons about building a startup, pivoting business models, and executing founder-led sales in the early stages.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Andy Ruben, Founder and Executive Chairman of Trove, about transforming retail through branded resale and the circular economy. Andy shares his startup origin story, the evolution from peer-to-peer to B2B, and insights on customer retention. He also discusses business development missteps, his leadership experience at Walmart, and why speed and focus matter most when launching a new venture.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Andy Ruben on LinkedIn | Website
• Trove

Special Mention(s):

• Sam Walton: Made In America by Sam Walton
• The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: “On Robustness and Fragility” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West
• Acquired Podcast

Related episode(s):

• “Terracycle.com: How to Make Money from 1.5 million Cigarette Butts & Save The World with Tom Szaky” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Developing Sustainable Solutions from Beer Waste with Dan Kurzrock Co-Founder of ReGrained” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Would you rather sell an item once or four times? And there’s an obvious answer.”
• “You convince a lot of people to come join. And you’ve got to be so bullish.”
• “Never waste a good crisis: the only way to approach an environment where most likely, you’ll fail.”
• “The better the Poshmarks and Depops did, the more brands would have to figure this out.”
• “If sustainability is ever going to have what we need, we better all love Airbnb.”

Action Steps:

1. Start with a focused brand partnership strategy: Launching with one or two aligned partners helps refine your model and build early credibility.
2. Design resale to reflect your brand identity: Integrating resale in a way that reinforces your brand values strengthens customer loyalty and program engagement.
3. Make it easy for customers to trade in items: A quick, frictionless process increases participation and improves retention through convenience and positive brand experience.
4. Use re-commerce as a customer acquisition tool: Offering used items helps attract new buyers and turns idle inventory into a cost-effective growth channel.
5. Prioritize founder-led sales in early stages: Keeping business development close to the founding team ensures faster learning and authentic, effective messaging.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:00

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Andy Ruben of Trove. You can check them out at trove.com and Andy, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since, I mean, when I think of in the research I’ve done for Trove is they invented Recommerce and we’ll talk about what that means.

But it’s really all about sustainability. And so some of my favorite interviews in the sustainability front was Tom Szaky of TerraCycle. He talked about how to make money from 1.5 million cigarette butts and how to save the world. That was a great episode. And also just developing sustainable solutions with beer waste with Dan Kurzrock of ReGrained they used to go for.

Have you heard of ReGrained before? Yeah. You have. Okay. Yeah.

It’s genius. It’s like the beer companies need to throw out the spent grain and they actually even pay to throw it out. So like, why not have someone come pick it up and reuse it and sell it? It’s like a no-brainer offer. Like, we’ll come pick it up and we’ll make stuff out of it, right?

So I love that episode. That and many more. Inspired Insider. How do you know about ReGrained.

Andy Ruben: 01:44

Just being in the sustainability space? Okay I feel like this space is not nearly big enough. And so you just who are.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 01:52

Some of your favorite companies in sustainability that are I mean, we all know like the Patagonias of the world and like any, any ones that maybe other people have not heard about. Like I wouldn’t have heard of ReGrained before someone mentioned them.

Andy Ruben: 02:07

I’m going to go in opposite direction. The companies I love most in sustainability are the ones you’d never think of for it. Airbnb. Instead of building a brand new hotel ground up, let’s use a house that’s not occupied, a room that’s not occupied. Let’s be able to be like in a place you couldn’t have a hotel.

To me, like, those are the things that are more interesting is when you when you, you know, ride sharing is another good one. When you take things that are so obvious now, you’d never think about them as being sustainability because they’re just better. And if sustainability is ever going to have out of it what we need, which it will, it better have a reason to be meaning we better all love Airbnb more than staying at a Hyatt or it’s not going to matter.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 02:53

Totally love it. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in two ways.

One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, accountability and the full production execution. Number two, we’re also an easy button for a company’s gifting, right? So we make gifting and staying top of mind to your clients, partners, prospects, even, you know, staff from a culture perspective, all people do is give us a list of their people and we do everything else. You know, kind of Andy, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background to make it stress-free and easy for companies to build amazing relationships.

And I found no better way over the last decade to profile the people and companies I admire on the podcast, and also send them sweet treats in the mail. So check it out! Rise25.com you can email us at [email protected].

I am super excited to introduce Andy Ruben. He’s widely recognized as a retail pioneer, known for launching Walmart’s acclaimed sustainability Ability Initiatives as its first chief sustainability officer and reimagining private, you know, brands spearheading early on the channel innovations and founding trove, which we’re going to talk about. And Trove is the company credited with creating the branded resale category alongside iconic brands such as Patagonia, REI and Lululemon, and many, many more. He’s been recognized by Fast Company, Fortune, and others as a transformative leadership and currently serves as a board member and advises Fortune 500 corporations. One of those, I think, is Zevia, and I actually love Zevia.

So you have it there.

Andy Ruben: 04:34

You’re never far from me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:36

So I want to start off, Andy, just talk about Trove and what Trove does. Yeah.

Andy Ruben: 04:43

Yeah, sure. I love when you talk about the easy button. You know, when you think about a brand. Let’s take Patagonia. When you think about a brand that really stands for something that’s got something to say that we love the idea that you would buy a Patagonia jacket for a kid, and then the brand is gone.

You own that Patagonia jacket. And the idea is when you’re no longer using it, when your kid outgrows it, you just hand it back. Trade it in, get money back for it, and then get the next size. So the idea that we, you know, the trove and the trove technology can make it easy for brands to do the back end work so that a company like, you know, you’re looking at some here Filson, Arc’teryx, Eileen Fisher, Brooks, whomever that they can make it easier for their customers to just stay engaged with the brand. And who needs a closet full of old jackets you never wear?

So just make it easy for your customers to stay with you. And by the way, when they hand items back, they typically stay with the brand for the next item. You take those items, especially in a moment of uncertainty and supply chain, and you create a supply of items that net new customers can now afford. So when a brand sells a used item, typically two-thirds of the customers who buy have never bought from the brand. Think about it like a negative kak being paid for kak right?

So customer acquisition. Anyway, it just makes sense. And where I’ve always seen the world going is that at some point we won’t think about products, that we just buy them and they just kind of amass in our lives. We’ll think about a world where we choose brands, we have access to better products, and they come in and out of our lives. And the way that we make that easy is we don’t do it through a new website we’ve never heard of.

We do it through the brands we love, we do it through the retailers we love because when we’re shopping, right. Anyway, maybe I can spend less today because I’m bringing in a tent that I haven’t used in two years, and someone else can be using it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:44

You know, I’ve heard you say this, Andy, would you rather sell an item once or four times? And there’s an obvious answer to that, right?

Andy Ruben: 06:55

Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the first conversations we had with the CEO at the time of Patagonia and this is in 2015, 2016, when we were first conceiving that a brand would buy back and resell their items online was let’s talk about your inventory. And, you know, a brand, typically when you ask that, we’ll talk about items in warehouses and stores. But 80% of the goods that a brand like a, you know, a Carhartt owns or in our closets, they’re in our lives.

So when you think about inventory, you know, every CEO will want to be sharing with the board that they’re optimizing all their inventory, not just the ten, 15% that’s in stores and warehouses, but every one of those hard-made, designed, thoughtful pieces. It’s a brand asset. What CEO is comfortable having a warehouse 20% occupied, right. Just sweat your assets.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:49

You know, having the idea and solving the problem are two different things. Right. This is a complicated I mean, it’s fragmented. There was fragmented solutions before you came in, right? People would go on.

Maybe they go send it to a thrift store. Maybe they would go on eBay. Who knows? Like the solutions people. But also it’s trusted.

Like if I’m getting a used car or something like that, I actually like going to the dealership and getting a certified used car. It’s just more trusted. So I’m curious and I know also know it didn’t start like the idea didn’t start to what it ended up. So I’d like to walk through kind of the evolution of Trove a little bit. And what was the original idea and the company, what did it look like in the beginning?

Andy Ruben: 08:34

Yeah, Trove before it was Trove. Trove was an entirely different company. The company was called Yodel. Don’t. We can talk about the name, but it was a moment where that name did not sound as odd as it does now.

And that company was born in 2011, and the idea was a community where we would, you know, there’s an alternative currency and you’d move items between people. Actually, originally it was a company that you would loan items to your friends, and it was born in the same moment as Zynga and companies that were built into the social graph on Facebook, kind of early days of Facebook. So you could loan out items to your first-degree friends on Facebook. And, you know, we realized that of people loaning items, it was actually many more people were looking to just kind of bequeath and kind of give items to other people, but kind of like a bottle of wine. You didn’t really want to walk over to someone’s house for dinner and hand them a $25 bill.

You wanted to bring a bottle of wine. So it became uncomfortable to use a fiat currency. And so we created a currency that was really about the goods. What was great about that? So by year 3 or 4, it was very typical of a company.

It wasn’t wildly financially successful, but it wasn’t unsuccessful. We had millions of monthly active users. There were millions of items being exchanged. We had weddings where people met on the platform.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:02

How did you get millions of people? I mean, that in itself is a feat whether someone’s monetizing it as much as they could or not. I mean, that’s not easy.

Andy Ruben: 10:14

There were a lot of breakthroughs along the way. Originally we, you know, probably dozens, a few that were really central. Originally it was all local. There was a breakthrough, and we allowed people to ship items because you got a lot more liquidity. Liquidity really matters.

I mean, the simple way to say it, it was like a 501-level class on marketplaces. And I remember in that moment I remember sitting with people who knew so much more than me about marketplaces because I’m from Walmart. Like, I’m not used to marketplaces at the time. And the people I would sit with would look at me like, oh, silly, silly man. Here’s, you know, you can’t just start a marketplace.

You’ve got to seed one side of it. And so we would send people out. Maybe a funny story, but we’d, you know, we had a bank, I think we were using Bank of America and we were trying to we would take out cash from Bank of America and hand it to like 15 people we’d find on TaskRabbit, you know, Leah’s company, TaskRabbit, and they’d go out to garage sales and they’d curate items and we’d have days where we’d, you know, we’d have the supply, and then we’d have buyers, and we’d slowly build a two sided marketplace, and you’ve got to have one side. And then at some point, the amount of money we were shelling out in $20 bills became so concerning to Bank of America that we were having trouble. So we had to go to multiple banks to get the amount of cash out.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:30

So did they think you were doing like buying drugs or something?

Andy Ruben: 11:33

Oh my gosh, I don’t know. But it was just like, I remember standing with someone fairly high up in Bank of America explaining it was my money, it was my company, and it was okay that we would withdraw cash, but it was just it’s all the things that happened right in the early journey of a startup. And some of them sound fun like that in retrospect. But really, I think the difficult parts are before you come up with those and you’re trying to manage ten people on a Google spreadsheet, it’s no big deal. But all of a sudden you’re managing 100 buyers and trying to figure that out on Google and just, you know, things get complex and you at every stage you need to figure out.

So I think shipping was a big deal. Curating a marketplace. Shipping was a big deal. Another breakthrough was offering free shipping for the, you know, items for people who were giving away, bequeathing more items. Right.

So you have to figure out what behavior you’re trying to incentivize, all the things that right now seem straightforward, but at the time to me were brand new. But as I sat with people in the Bay area, often people who’d grown up at eBay, you know, they were things they just knew and they would share them. And I would, gosh, I would digest them as quickly as possible and grab everyone I could.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:42

So it started off as that two-sided marketplace platform, which is really difficult. Any two-sided marketplace is difficult. And you built it up to millions of people. Yeah. What was the next phase of growth?

Andy Ruben: 12:56

There was a moment that I realized. So we were the people in the space at the time. It was Julie from the Rio Real. James had ThredUp maneesh from Poshmark. You know, there’s a group of us and there weren’t that many.

And it’s early and we’re by the way, we weren’t called now it’s called circular. At the time it was called the sharing Economy at the same time as Lyft and Airbnb and, you know, desk sharing and office sharing. And, you know, I realized at a certain point that there were a lot of that the trend people wanted to do this. But as a startup, I didn’t see the ability to return capital to our investors. And honestly, I think the ThredUp bag was like a breakthrough that I really respected and was jealous of was a really good breakthrough at ThredUp.

And you’d see these things, and I just realized that there was a need here, but we weren’t going to make it as a company unless we change something And at the same time, the brands we are working with, we had a bunch of Patagonia on the site talking to Patagonia every week, and Patagonia is like, gosh, it’s great, we love what you’re doing. But it’d be really nice if Patagonia jackets weren’t next to a coffee maker, right? We’re thinking, oh, cool, maybe we should add Patagonia Eileen Fisher. We’re working with eBay at the time with an eBay store, but that wasn’t keeping their brand at the level they wanted to see their brand. And so, you know, there was a moment where it became, you know, we really had the, that the way to make money in this space wasn’t to mine for gold.

It was to sell Levi’s jeans or pickaxe and shovels so we could be the B2B support for the brands. And the better that the postures and, you know, Depops and Vintage did, the more that brands would have to figure this out or lose market share, and then we’d be the technology provider to give them the infrastructure to do that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:47

What did that look like?

Andy Ruben: 14:50

That I make the pivot sound obvious. Like we had a moment that we just decided to switch the business. It was anything but that. I feel like, in the honesty of it, it took so long to go through and I’d never recommend it to anyone. And the only reason I think we actually did it was because I didn’t expect to do it.

I thought we’d sell Yerdle, and we had an offer on the table for someone to buy the Yerdle kind of platform, the membership, what we’d done. And I think in some ways I might have messed up a final pitch. But anyway, that fell through. We got a second offer, but all the while it’s like you’re trying to you’re explaining to your investors that you’re going to sell the company and it’s going to be fine. You’re trying to convince a team.

We had about 70 people there, and every day I remember walking into our office downtown San Francisco, and you walk in and someone always pulls you aside and says, Andy, if you’ve got a minute today, and after a while, you just, you know, somebody would say that and you’re like, so-and-so, I know you’re quitting. You don’t have to find me. I get it. You’re leaving. I wish you well.

Like, just leave your. Leave your whatever at the. You know you’re good. And it just became so hard to get a team to kind of keep the faith that there was a reason to stay when everyone around was leaving. And you were trying to hold that together to sell the company, knowing that if you didn’t, you know you were going to have to figure something else out.

And one thing I really regret was how many times I came home and told my spouse that we were going to sell the company and we should celebrate. And obviously two of those fell through. A third one somewhat came up and I was exhausted by the process. And at that point, luckily, I guess looking back, we’d become enamored enough about this Patagonia idea. And that was going to launch in 2016 for Black Friday.

Patagonia then held off, didn’t launch, where I again thought the company was going under, but we went down to probably four people Out of the 60. Before then we slowly built it back up to several hundred. But that was fairly dark. It was fairly dark. I mean, it’s not coming across now in my gestures because it’s in hindsight, but.

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