G2RL: Reverse Logistics for the Modern Retail Economy

Innovation happens when the right team takes on a particularly intractable challenge. In the reverse logistics space, you couldn’t ask for a team more “right” than G2RL. Prior to founding G2RL, this leadership team including Herb Shear as executive chairman, Tom Perry as CEO, and Julian Mitchell as CIO, spent the better part of two decades together building GENCO into a reverse logistics pioneer.

We are not being hyperbolic when we say this is one of the most experienced leadership teams in the history of venture-backed logistics startups.

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The Challenge

Consumers are expected to buy almost a trillion and a half dollars in goods online in 2023. Then, according to the National Retail Federation, they’re projected to return nearly $250B of those purchases. As much as we’d like to believe that all those items we return are restocked and re-sold. However, the bulk ends up liquidated, donated, or destroyed. The evaluating, routing, and shipping of products in the “reverse logistics” part of the sales process is not cheap. That leaves retailers with the difficult task of balancing pricing and customer expectations against controlling returns losses and shoring up their bottom line.

Adding to all this, online sales are growing faster than in-person retail (10% growth projected in 2024 to 4%). And, they’re returned with more frequency. Without a fresh approach to reverse logistics, these challenges are only going to compound. And that’s where G2RL comes in.

THE G2RL APPROACH

In three short years, G2RL has built a returns management system that’s already saved their customers millions of dollars. They’re leveraging their depth in experience and purpose-built predictive analytics to help e-commerce retailers achieve higher recovery rates on returns. They’re also engaged at the third-party logistics (3PL)-level, enabling those companies to build out their own modernized returns service capabilities. It’s a full stack approach with significant potential beyond just the substantial retail market
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DTC INVESTMENT‍

Over the last several years, we’ve been exploring and investing in companies building technologies that solve for real – and often expensive – pain points in the supply chain and logistics spaces. G2RL joins Exotec, Regrello, Skan.ai, and Tag-n-Trac in our logistics portfolio. Leading a seed round in a team this experienced and this accomplished in a an economy-driving industry was obvious. That Tom, Herb, Julian and team chose DTC to invest is an honor. We’re looking forward to the journey with them.

Gregg & Team DTC