On Wednesdays, we wear pink spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself. Emily Hosie led merchandising at TJX before founding overstock marketplace Rebel. How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? I lead Rebel, where we take never-used returns and overstock from top retailers and turn them into the kind of deals that make you stop and think, “How can these prices be real?” We work with retailers to acquire returned and excess stock, often brand new, and resell it across 87 different categories like home, kitchen, wellness, baby, and more. Every product is quality checked, so what you’re getting is real value, not a gamble. At its heart, it’s a win-win: Shoppers save big, and retailers recover value from inventory that would otherwise sit unsold, or worse, end up in a landfill. One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? That behind every “Wait, how is this such a deal?” moment is a pretty complex operation. We’ve built a tech system that handles everything from large-scale returns processing to inspecting every single item, to pricing it competitively before it ever goes live. It’s part retail, part supply chain, part tech, but day to day, it just feels like solving a lot of interesting problems and trying to make the experience amazing for customers. What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Rebel, without hesitation. We started processing returns at scale in baby gear and have grown into a multi-category platform across home, kitchen, and lifestyle. Seeing this expansion and growth has been really rewarding, but what’s stuck with me most is the impact. We’re now diverting over 50 million pounds of product from going to waste every year. That’s when it stops feeling like “just retail.” Keep reading here.—EC |