Why Individualized Inventory Powers the Best Resale Businesses

Karri: Hello and welcome to the Recommerce Podcast, the podcast where we talk all things Recommerce and circular businesses. This week, we are focusing on resale businesses and why individualized inventory is crucial when you are selling once-used or pre-loved goods. As usual, I'm joined by Tuomo Laine, the CEO and co-founder of Twice Commerce. Welcome.

Tuomo: Thank you, Karri. I think we promised that we're gonna have some other guests also, but we need to follow up on that.

Karri: Absolutely. I think we have something cooking up for the fall and most likely going to have pretty interesting guests coming. I agree. Let's start by just maybe defining what we mean when we're talking about a resale business.

Tuomo: Sure. A resale business in our case just means that you're selling a good that has been once used before or pre-loved. In between, you might sell it as it is as a secondhand good, or you might do some refurbishment for it. But essentially, it is a good that has once been out there and it's not anymore comparable to a new product.

Karri: Okay, so in a sense, this item already has some type of unique history, unique condition, and unique characteristics that actually make it unique.

Tuomo: Exactly. So even though, well, first of all, if we don't do any refurbishment for it, it has a unique condition. It might have unique scratch marks or some wear and tear, which kind of as it has its unique condition, it probably affects also its price point. And also, someone looking to buy it might be more careful around whether there are, you know, marks on the paint or whether it's some small detail that they don't care that much. But anyhow, every item is unique in its condition, that's the main point. Then if we do refurbishment, we try to kind of push that product to be closer to what new products are. So we might change parts. For example, products that have batteries, we might replace a new battery in there, but the frame might still have like wear and tear marks and so on. But all of this is kind of, every item can be standardized on some parts, but they might be unique on others. So that's kind of the main point there, if that was the most confusing way of describing that.

Karri: I assume that as every item has its own history, its own condition, also the inventory must be able to accommodate this. So you are not able to have just one SKU and list different types of items in different conditions under that one SKU.

Tuomo: Yeah, or you can do that, but then you're potentially losing on some opportunities to actually make more money. So if you try to systemize all of your products under, I don't know, three grades, there still is variance inside those grades that you could utilize. You can utilize it either on the sales side of things, so by giving more granularity to the end-user, you might be able to find better sales opportunities. It of course depends a bit on the product category. But using for example bikes, some people might be less sensitive to some scratch marks on the frame, so you might be losing on some possibilities there if you try to kind of push everything under some grades. Also, on the inventory management side of things, especially if you do refurbishment or similar, you might be losing on some critical data on like what my inventory actually looks like. So if you package them under just like three SKUs, the individual bike and its three conditions, if you have three SKUs for those, you're losing all of the details of what has happened there. So if you want to track where did these items come from, what was the condition when it came in, what did we do for it? If you aggregate all of these under one SKU, it becomes like a very messy like a black box that you're not able to analyze when you're trying to figure out how might we improve our operations or sales or purchasing or any of our operation. And then maybe going back into like productization, unless you have these items uniquely listed, you cannot really in a sensible way have unique product images for your listings. So if you look into marketplaces like Bicycle.com... I think it's B-U-Y-C-Y-C-L-E... most of their listings, if you look at the listings, each one of those images is actually from that actual bike that you're buying, not from an average, you know, Grade B bike. So in order to achieve that, you probably need an individualized inventory where for that specific bike you can hold all of the needed data and specific media like images or maintenance reports and so on.

Karri: This type of individualized inventory, what's all the data that it actually can hold? Or ideally, like what, what is it... let's start from the moment that you receive it. Like, what is that already something that you start recording to that specific item?

Tuomo: Yeah, well in systems like Twice, there's actually no limit on what you can hold it. You can hold whatever you want it to hold. But maybe the kind of standard things that you might want to record are things like, well, the source—where did you get it? Because if you start to, if you buy back or trade it in or wherever you get it, over time you can start to see kind of the quality and value of different sources, for example. So you kind of record where did I get it, how much did I pay for it, if anything. You probably want to record the condition. You can record it as a one-liner, kind of one status, or you can record it as 100 different nodes on sub-parts of the product, whatever your operation and the product categories are. And then you record probably the quite standard information that you hopefully can pull from a catalog already, an existing catalog. So when you identify and inspect what the product is, you probably still want to record things like brand, coloring, size details, and all of these things. And increasingly nowadays, you might want to record some sustainability information, again, sources, where did we get it, anything that you know. You might want to record out of that product, if you've done some spare part changes, maybe you want to record that in that, "we bought it, but we invested already $100 in changing the battery for example." So that being said, there's no limit but it probably is source, value, kind of standard product details, and then some records of what have been refurbished or done for the product.

Karri: Okay, so that's the inventory management side, and it sounds like there is some kind of timeline that kind of like comes out of this as everything kind of follows each other and you can see the journey of the item since you actually received it and ideally every single step with all the costs.

Tuomo: Yeah, ideally you can do that. So you can record everything as an event or then the simplest form is that you just record them as like key-value pairs. If you imagine almost like your, if your inspection or let's say your inspection and refurbishment process for a bike, you might say that you have a, you create a let's call it like an attribute group or kind of card that has a title "Inspection Details" and then you've pre-filled that, "Hey, for every product we do these eight things," and then you mark the values for those eight things. And maybe you might have a ninth one, which is a formula that kind of sums everything together. So then that might be your refurbishment cost center, for example. So it doesn't necessarily... you don't have to put them into a timeline, but you have like a record of everything that has been done to it. Okay. Hope that makes sense.

Karri: Absolutely. And after, after you have kind of like refurbished it or or not, then you have all that information in the system, in the individualized inventory system, and then you want to maybe use this when you start actually productizing it or creating sales listings out of it. It might be online store or in-store, but you want to maybe turn this data into something that somebody can purchase.

Tuomo: Yeah, yeah, you want to turn the data into to be like an asset when someone's figuring out whether I want to purchase this. So if you've taken images of the product, those become the listing's product images. If you have some technical details or history of how has the item been maintained, those become or can become a kind of section in your listing telling that, "Okay, we've done all of these refurbishments for it." So all of this becomes information that can be, can be used in that, in this kind of sales touch point for the consumer to make their decision whether they want to purchase it or not. Of course, you don't have to disclose everything, but it also might help you understand like, "how much have we invested into this product?" so at what price point we might be kind of looking to get get rid of it or to monetize it.

Karri: You have the flexibility based on your business model. If you want to actually, like you mentioned a bicycle, that you actually have like a listing for each of those bikes. But for example, Swappie, which probably has like thousands or tens of thousands of iPhones, they probably don't want to have like ten thousand listings of the same iPhone with like almost identical photos but maybe like some small scratches and you might actually want to package those into under these categories. So this is probably something you are also able to do even if you have all of the like individual data underneath.

Tuomo: Definitely. So like you mentioned, there are product categories where this doesn't make sense, for example for clothes, might not make sense for like, or some category of clothes. For operations like Swappie that has very well standardized high-quality refurbishment operation, that can say that "all of our grade B phones are grade B phones." Like you cannot necessarily even make them a part of each other. So you can have your catalog and listings reflect this kind of standardized approach and connect them with like a SKU, like a stock-keeping unit space to their inventory. But the inventory can still under the hood be listed as individual items, so that if Swappie wants to make an analysis on like, "Hey, currently we have 1,000 grade B iPhone 13s in our inventory, let's double-click and actually see what do those 1,000 phones look like." I'm gonna do a leap of faith analogy here, it's almost like 2008. If you have if you package a lot of subprime loans under one loan, it might look good but under the hood you might find some patterns that are worrying or maybe great. So then it's like you have the ability to go one step deeper in seeing what is this kind of aggregated thing of a grade B iPhone, that is Series 13 phone, actually made out of. And then you can find some things to improve or just other opportunities that wouldn't be possible without having the access to the individualized item level. And with phones, it's kind of built in because every phone has their email codes and all of that, so it should be relatively easy to uphold this kind of a view to your assets.

Karri: Maybe not going deeper in this episode into actually then selling this this type of item, but you are probably able to use this information and package it no matter like what is the sales channel, like is it your online store or your own channel, or is it some kind of marketplace? And those probably have some predefined categories and so on and kind of like linking these together somehow.

Tuomo: Yeah, yeah. So there is always this space of of your catalog, essentially kind of describing what am I selling, like the offer, the promise to the market. And then that you can split and make visible across channels and so on. And then you have your inventory, which is effectively what you actually have and the condition of those. And then the catalog points to your inventory or your stock, saying that, "Hey, every time someone buys this thing from my catalog, I need this kind of stuff to be available in my inventory." So you have these two universes. Now, the catalog is limited by the way how you keep stock of your inventory. If the more granular you're in your inventory and stock-keeping, the more granular you can go with your listings. And you can do things like, "Hey, for this sales channel I'm gonna keep it basic and general, but for this niche marketplace where I have niche buyers, I might actually create extremely granular listings." So you're kind of able to cater both channels, but if your inventory is super high level and abstract where you package a lot of things under SKUs, then your catalog cannot really go deeper than that. That's the I think the paradigm there. But having an individualized inventory doesn't force you to record every last detail. You can still like have extremely aggregated SKUs and essentially just know the unique number of items and everything has just an ID, but and you can run an extremely like high-level operation. But at any given moment, if you want to list an individual item out, you can do so. That's maybe the some level level split of the operation. So sales channels reflect your catalog. Your catalog reflects how you productize things. How you productize things is dependent on what level of a view do you actually have to your assets. And the more granular that is, the more you can more granular you can productize in your catalogs. I hope that makes sense.

Karri: Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like the catalog and inventory are kind of like unlinked or uncoupled. And then you are able to kind of like play with these. They are connected, but they are not like they don't equal. So this inventory item is not one of my listings or so on, and it can be maybe part of multiple listings, so they're kind of decoupled in this world.

Tuomo: Yeah, definitely. It's it's a more dynamic relationship, which allows you to create more dynamic value propositions also to the market and a bit overlapping value proposition also. So I think historically it was so that you build a product catalog and then you then you told how much of that product you had. And those systems that empowered that often made it almost impossible for you to have one product that is listed in two different listings without you starting to have double bookings or kind of double bookkeeping or kind of multiplying your inventory. Then you had to kind of hack together some packages, bundles, or whatnot try to achieve that, which was like a superficial layer on top of the catalog. Now with the more dynamic approach, you can effectively have complete freedom on how you build and productize your catalog to fit that fits any sales channel and customer type without worrying too much about the implications on your stock keeping, because these two aren't so tightly coupled. You're just kind of in the catalog describing to your stock that "if someone buys this kind of a listing, I need these kind of things to be available," but it doesn't have to point essentially to a specific thing that would be reserved for this catalog this listing now and forever. It is, I think it's a word where especially when it comes to high value goods or repairable goods, like, I don't know, electronics and sports equipment or power tools or cars or machinery, these things start to be super important because the individual asset is so valuable that if you just lock it into one value proposition and listing, you might be losing on opportunities, other opportunities. So if you have something that costs 10,000, I don't know, like a forklift, old forklift, you have ten thousand dollar worth of old forklift. You might want to be all okay to kind of rent it out but still want to list it as used in a marketplace if someone is willing to buy it. But you don't want to kind of just keep it on the side until someone buys it, you want to monetize it in between. So I think it always becomes easier to figure out the value of that the higher you go on the value of the goods. And then if it's a cheaper good, then there's other tactics on monetizing them.

Karri: So the connection changes from being this like one-to-one link, this type of like absolute connection, to like rule-based. So this listing can include this brand, these types of conditions and maybe this model and so on, rather than saying like, "Hey, this listing equals this item or these three items."

Tuomo: Yeah, effectively. So so you can you don't have to make these kind of very tight catalog to SKU relationship. You can just describe the item in a more kind of in a rule-based language that, "What do I need to have available when someone purchases this listing or books this listing?"

Karri: Okay, so I think we have now a pretty clear picture of what is it and what it requires from your inventory system and kind of the flexibility behind it. And it kind of sounds like it's potentially a lot of work also. So is there some type of business size or average purchase price or something like that where this world kind of works? Or are you able to sell like five-dollar items with this, like having the inspection and refurbishment and and creating all of them and managing the inventory? Or does it require you to actually only sell like high-value goods?

Tuomo: Yeah, it's a great question. I think to try to simplify it, it's just a question of the cost of the time that you need to invest in order to get a kind of a reason listing up and running. And then what do you need to like in minimum, what do you need to do in order to have a resale listing up and running is to have an image of the product, description of the product and a price of the product. I think that's probably the minimum that you need. So what do you need to do in order to achieve that? Well, if you're selling super cheap goods and you get a, usually it's a product return, or that you want to remonetize via secondhand listing or or or such. If it's a high-value good, of course you can invest 30 minutes or so in kind of figuring out the right price points. If it's something that you, like you said, costs, I don't know, ten dollars originally. I think in order to make a margin, you probably can invest I don't know, 30 seconds or a minute into it. So if we would go back eight years, it would start to be super hard to do it on the individual level. So you would probably have to just wait that you get, I don't know, 50 of those and then you do like you just count that, "I have 50 of something at that point," and then you create a resale listing and then those 50 accumulated maybe justifies it. Nowadays, creating a resale listing can be as fast as just snapping a photo of the item. Something that we we've been working on a lot is that when you get the return, you just snap a photo of it. And from that point, AI essentially first of all registers that item to your inventory, registers all of the kind of key condition details and so on, might match it against your catalog in order to get the kind of correct product details in, and then automatically can spin out that resale listing for you with an appropriate price point. So then we start to be in a place where creating listings for items that cost even five dollars actually might make sense. So a secondhand shop or thrift shop might be able to just take all of the stuff that they get in, snap photos of them, they have resale listings out of them in online, and they can price them at the same time for their kind of in-store experience. And all of a sudden they have an online plus in-store business running for even like thrift store level, like cheap thrift store level goods, which to me is kind of the proof that you can actually start to productize even cheaper product returns at scale.

Karri: Okay, so this is a pretty great example of where AI actually is enabling and making you more efficient and kind of enabling you to do this even on a lower average volume or average price goods.

Tuomo: Yeah, definitely. And it's anyone can try it out with, well, ChatGPT or you can try it with Google Lens, like just point it at a thing and it's pretty good at telling you what it is and maybe even its price point and all of that. So it is technology that is out there and that I've seen many market like resale marketplaces already adapting and and businesses like us are adapting as a technology to enable merchants to do to manage for example product returns a lot faster. So this kind of, I think it's one of the biggest implications that AI has for commerce and product return specifically.

Karri: What about like retailers that are mainly selling new items and they are looking to maybe monetize their product returns? And in this world, they already kind of have the catalog and they are selling like lower quality versions of that. So is there is there any way for them to kind of link it that, "Hey, this is what it's supposed to look when it's new," and "here is like a photo of a unique item that I got a product return," like "please identify how it differs and maybe highlight those in the description or similar?" I think that's maybe compared to a thrift store where you might like get anything in and you are like you don't actually know what it is and you are like saying that, "this is a statue made 30 years ago." But in the product return retail environment, you already have your product catalog and can linking these together.

Tuomo: Yeah, that is possible. And I think it's an approach that for example software providers like us can now in this new, it's not a more new era, but like the current era, what we can start to enable. So for a more mature retailer that probably has a quite well-documented product information management system or they they're kind of SKU-based and they have like reference photos for all of their SKUs and and so on, that existing information allows, I would call that like a reference check almost, like first of all to identify what is it against a pre-existing catalog and images. Then from that point then doing the kind of comparison on like, "What is different between these two things?" in order to get a better grading or a better description of current condition to that retail listing. It is a bit more like I'd say enterprise-level grade thing, I think, for a while. But then I don't see any reason why this couldn't be quite widely accessible for any merchant. I think the true bottleneck there is that how well-documented an existing catalog you have of the kind of new stuff that you're doing, but any any larger retailer should have it in their existing product information systems. IKEA is, by the way, a great example of this that they are already doing this with their... they have a marketplace where they facilitate sales between consumers. But the value that IKEA brings to the table—there's a lot of value, but one of them is that when you kind of create the listing in that marketplace, IKEA does exactly this. It kind of goes into their catalog, identifies the object for you because IKEA has all of the knowledge of the product, and even does these kind of security checks. It tries to identify that is this a product that has been for example recalled, so it does safety checks also there. And then they try to kind of make sure that in there the marketplace that they host for peer-to-peer selling that you can be more sure that a) these are existing IKEA products, b) they are safe, they haven't been recalled, and then c) might even give you like more realistic price points because they of course know the value of the new products.

Karri: That sounds really, really interesting and a really awesome use case that IKEA has figured out. And I assume especially in the furniture industry it's really crucial to actually get the dimensions and everything probably automatically from IKEA's catalog. So all of this sounds really awesome and something that's probably going to change the whole resale landscape in the near future and already is. But how hard or how easy it is actually to start utilizing this? So for example, with Twice, let's say like a thrift store or a retailer who has never done anything like this, they probably never used individualized inventory. You know, how easy it is for them to start using it? Do they need to hire somebody that knows this or are they able to just like get up and running and actually get some value out of it?

Tuomo: Yeah, I think it's relatively easy. If we start from the point that you have a pile of product returns or items that you want to list out to be sold, the first step is to get them into your inventory. And in our system, there are kind of three ways on how to get that done. If you are that kind of a merchant that already has built an Excel out of them, great, just import the Excel, and then you have your inventory up and running, and then from that point on, you can start creating resale listings out of those and or whatever you kind of want to do next. The other one is that you can go one by one, so manually entering the information, just looking at what it is and describing it. Or the third one is using images. So we have a way of how you can just if you have your, let's say, Twice opening on your laptop, with your phone you can just take a photo of the item, it uploads it to Twice, Twice analyzes what it is, pretty much kind of does its best job that it can in pre-filling all of the information that would be needed based on the image. You can correct if we do some kind of get something wrong, but then essentially what you're doing, you're snapping photos of the items that you want to start selling or renting or whatever the productization idea is. So if you're able to take a photo of an item, if you're able to describe the item, or if you have an Excel of the items, you should be up and running. If any of those three steps is too scary, then you need some help, and depending on the size of the or the volume of the of the operation, the help might be us, our partner, or I don't know, your nephew.

Karri: And it sounds like you are able to get started pretty easily. So just getting stuff into your inventory, basically snapping a photo, making sure that all the details make sense or the prices in a, let's say, similar range that you were thinking about. And then you are basically you can create this item into your inventory and quite easily also create a listing that's available for example on your online store. And after that, if you want to go further, what about then like if you want to actually start some kind of refurbishment or inspection or or adding these type of events to these individual items? So maybe as an example, like the first step is that there is one person who does this, like taking the photo and putting it in, and then it goes maybe to a next person. Like, how easy it is for them to start creating or or inspecting and actually putting that data into the system and then get that data in use when you are creating the listings or monetizing it?

Tuomo: It all depends on the first person, whether they mark the item somehow with an ID, hopefully a sticker that has a barcode or something quickly readable in it. After that point, the next person can always just scan that barcode and all of the item details open in Twice, and then they can fill in the stuff that they want to kind of fill in. So it is kind of in the first, if you don't have that, then the other person needs to go into the inventory and find the item based on just looking at it. So in the first step it usually is helpful if you want once you do the inspection and you kind of register the item in that you print some kind of a label and attach it to the product or maybe it has already somehow it built in, but anyhow, that's the kind of key point. After that, it's pretty easy for anyone to just read that item and then start logging the kind of information that is relevant for them into that item.

Karri: Yeah, it makes sense that when you are talking about uniquely identified, individualized inventory, you also have that in the physical item that you are able to not only say in in digital form that "now we're talking about this," but easily also also grab the right item. And after that, then you are able to start inputting more data. And there is this timeline and you have some costs and time that you've spent on it. And then monetizing it or creating those listings. And how about that? It sounds like it's a little bit different than in some linear commerce software where you just say like, "hey, here is item that I want to sell, and I have 20 of these." But now you're starting that you have inventory, a bunch of items, and some type of logic. And now you want to create listings, unique or maybe some bulk listings out of this.

Tuomo: Yeah, I think it's if you're if you're creating a unique listing for the item, it's as simple or simpler than the linear commerce. You just you scan the item, you have its information open, and at least in our software you can just like press a button and create the listing for it. Then then fill in the... it tries to again pre-fill the commercial information like, "okay, description, this price, this." All of this kind of comes from the information that you've stored, or then you need to fill it in at that point and then you get the unique product images also. If you want to create a bulk listing that points to many unique items, then you kind of start from the listing first. It's as easy as in linear. You just create the kind of sales offering, but then when you say kind of what actually is this, this is in my inventory, this is where the rule-based thing comes into play. So you just effectively say that, "this needs anything with a SKU of this," or "this needs anything with a brand of this and that or a SKU of this and a grading of that." And all of the information that was previously filled in is available for you in that rule definition of "what do I need to have available?" So it is it can be as simple as the as the linear listing, just saying what the SKU is, or you can go more granular if you want.

Karri: And it sounds like it's quite easy to get started here and maybe get more out of Twice or similar software as you're kind of progressing. But just getting an item, maybe a product return, snapping a photo of it, making sure all the details are there, and then you can create a listing that is a starting point which you can then start to refine rather than you have to first kind of understand how is this ERP OS system working and where do I have to fill anything and what does this do if I put something here, how is it going to affect here?

Tuomo: Yeah, it is. And then I think that's something that we're consciously trying to always achieve is that in the world of commerce, I think that the rule of thumb at least that I try to have is that you have an idea of what you get done in the next 30 minutes, and you never get that done. You get disrupted by colleagues, customers, or whatever. So the kind of approach is that if your operation is interrupted, nothing is kind of broken or kind of half-made and then you have a half-made promise out of the market. So you can just always kind of encapsulate, "okay, now I'm just bringing stuff into the inventory," even though you will be planning on creating listings immediately. If you forgot to do it or you're interrupted, nothing breaks down essentially. So and that that way of making sure that you have this like compartmentalized microtasks should also mean that in your day to day where real world happens, you're not forced to kind of uphold very complex things, but rather you can do simple things in a chain, which should actually make it also easier to use for anyone because they can focus on small things at a time.

Karri: Maybe to the end, like what is your recommendation for let's say a retailer that is doing like pretty high volume already, maybe in the clothes industry, and they are getting those product returns and maybe so far they have kind of like gone through them, like, "am I able to sell it as a new or is it somehow like not in a good condition anymore?" And then they might have even like get rid of it or hopefully recycled it, but maybe even burned it in some cases, like just getting rid of it. So you have these two options. So let's say that you are making like a million a year, so it's already a pretty nice volume business and like, is it worth it for you to actually start this process? And what is the value that you might get out of it rather than having this kind of like two options to suddenly start productizing these product returns as used items or...

Tuomo: Yeah, I think the question is first that, "Okay, what is your brand? Does it hurt your brand if you have an outlet or secondhand corner in your sales channel, whether it's online or offline?" If it does hurt your brand, then you need to do it with a partner or someone else. Then if you're doing a million, let's assume you have 20% product return rates. Then that would mean that you kind of you've done a million and then this map... I'm cutting corners with the math, but let's say that if you would be able to sell those as new, you would have had two hundred thousand dollars worth of stuff. But maybe there were some deficiencies in there and you're not able to of course sell them at the new price point. I think in this analogy, let's say you sell them with a 50% discount. So you have like a hundred thousand. And maybe not all of them are resellable. So let's be aggressive and go that you have 50,000 more in revenue that you could make by having some kind of a process in place. And then if you're in that clothing industry, it is then a question that, "Okay, do I list them in under my own channel or do I then list them in in Vinted or somewhere else where I'm gonna kind of start selling my good-as-new or usable product returns?" And then if you sell it under your own channel, the 50,000 kind of sales in your own pocket if you have the customer base that would be interested in that and if you feel that doesn't hurt your mainstream sales. If you want to be more conservative and kind of have a specified channel for it, you might do it be a marketplace like Vinted or similar where it's a question that how easy it is for you to create those listings for that potential 50,000 dollars. If the average purchase price would be, I don't know, 10 bucks, that would mean 5,000 listings. So then it's a question of how easily can you list those 5,000 items to Vinted. And there probably it becomes a question that you're already getting the stuff back, so the personnel that is handling that once they do this kind of facilitation, is it worthwhile for them to snap 5,000 photos over a year and list them into Vinted and package them for you to make an extra 50,000? Often it is. I think the math says that it is valuable because you start to get better data. You actually pays itself back. So and it is at least nowadays it is a good brand kind of investment also to make sure that you handle your product returns in a responsible way. So that's my quick math, I think, for that merchant doing 1 million, and I was just throwing some numbers there, but it ballpark seems to make sense to start doing it.

Karri: Maybe as a follow-up question then is like let's stay in this same example. Like, not actually sure if for example Vinted has this AI generation, like listing, but I assume that they do or they will. So let's say that it takes the same amount of time to create the listing directly to Vinted or on Twice, which maybe has some kind of like a sync to these marketplaces. Like, why would you choose to have like a Twice or this commerce OS between rather than just putting it straight to the marketplace?

Tuomo: I think it's a question of how much information you want to have in your own system. So you want to probably analyze over a year that what did we actually sell and when. That probably Vinted offers you some visibility, but Twice is then built for businesses. So you get a lot better visibility in your inventory and analytics and doing reporting and and such that how did it look like in terms of resales. So it is a tool-based built for retailers and merchants that probably need a lot more data than just the basic things that you get from a Vinted listing. Of course, the more we would add these kind of sync things that maybe you want to list it in e.b.m., Vinted at the same time, all of these things then start to add value because then you created it once and you have it in two places at the same time. But in practice, I would say that recording that information for your own use is already kind of one of the key points there, that you have this visibility in one place.

Karri: Okay, so you get more data that most likely is valuable in the future when you are maybe looking at which factory actually produces a lot of this stuff. You might be able to get some insights like, "Hey, these product returns that are in not so great condition actually come from one factory." And this is something that can affect your whole whole business. And then you have multiple marketplaces where you can push it, and I know that Twice also has its own online store. So no matter if you want to start there or start with the marketplaces, then you might want to at some point have kind of like that own channel where you actually maybe hold a little bit more revenue and kind of own the whole customer experience and the relationship.

Tuomo: Yeah, definitely. If you want to have like your own secondhand store under your own brand, that's super easy with Twice. It kind of comes out of the box. So you and then you can still separate it from your own like existing online store if you don't want to kind of embed it there but have it as like a separate place where you go. Some of the merchants that we've had have an approach where they might have like a URL kind of custom domain used in Twice that says like "resale.yourbrandname.com." So it is a separate place where you go and do or we kind of renew and all of these kind of that where you do this kind of outlet, resale, refurbishment-related shopping. And then they might replicate this even in their in-store environment if they have that, that there's the usually like 80 to 90% of the store is for the new stuff, but there is this resale, recommerce corner that hosts all of the kind of outlet stock and private returns that are resaleable. That corner which is a nice, nice kind of in-store attraction for many many modern shoppers.

Karri: Absolutely. So it sounds like in the resale space, it's all about having that individualized inventory and that's the starting point, how easy it is to record it there. And then that's the data that you are going to use when if you are building some type of refurbishment operation or anything like that, that's also where the data lives. And then even the listings and how you're productizing, it's still based on that individualized inventory and that data which you can spin out to multiple marketplaces, your online store, exactly like that. All right, I think we got a lot of good insights into the world of world of resales and the individualized inventory. And hopefully for somebody who is maybe thinking about starting this with product returns or they want to take their thrift store online, this is hopefully very valuable content. So thank you a lot for your great insights, Tuomo.

Tuomo: Thank you for inviting me, Karri, and great questions.