Denver-based Two Boxes launched from stealth Tuesday with seed funding and a new product to help brands and logistics suppliers manage customer returns.
Two Boxes is an e-commerce startup that integrates with platforms like Shopify and Loop and helps brands and third-party logistics providers (3PLs) collect data on customer returns to facilitate and improve the process. The company’s $4.5 million seed round was led by Vinyl Capital.
“We are a system of record for return operations in warehouses so that any employee in that warehouse knows how to inspect a brand’s merchandise,” Kyle Bertin, co-founder and CEO of Two Boxes, told Built In.
Currently, merchandise returns are managed in a very cluttered manner in which 3PLs receive returned products but don’t have any data on the state of the product. In turn, the warehouse workers comb through each return to inspect the item and determine if it can be reshelved or if it must be thrown away. According to Bertin, this process involves a lot of manual labor and can take over a month to manage a return.
With Two Boxes’ platform, warehouses get data on the merchandise’s condition before receiving the item, which can speed up the process of reselling the merchandise. For items that still need to be inspected, the platform also serves as a hub that details the inspection process and quality standards for the brands whose products they process.
“Being able to understand the received quality of a return when it comes back and being able to tie in a lot of other data that we capture in this process enables us to shine a light on a lot of things that logistics operators and brands didn’t have a good way to capture before,” Bertin said. “We can use data to become a lot more intelligent about returns.”
With the new funding, Bertin told Built In that Two Boxes will expand its headcount by hiring software engineers and other nontechnical roles such as sales and customer success talent, among other roles. The capital will also enable the company to scale its product and develop new features.
Prior to launching Two Boxes, Bertin and his co-founder Evan Stalter worked at Outrider, a Colorado-based logistics company that develops autonomous yard trucks.
