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Embracing Sustainability and the circular economy in E-Commerce with Zoe Rowswell
65 Plays1 year ago
Ever since the dawn of E-commerce, the focus has been on growth, almost at all costs. Brands have developed huge profits by encouraging a consume-consume-consume mentality. But at what cost to society and the environment? Retail has a problem, and meaningful, tangible sustainability has to be part of the solution.
Zoe Rowswell started working in E-commerce at the very start, helping brands like Topshop and Disney establish online stores. Over the years Zoe has worked with many household names, including Urban Outfitters and Jimmy Choo.
This deep insight into the retail industry and growing dissatisfaction with how big brands managed their sustainability responsibilities inspired Zoe to launch Tern.
Tern is a Shopify app that enables retailers of any size to set up buy-back and trade-in systems that are brilliant for customer acquisition and retention. In this episode of the untitled SEO podcast, we talk about sustainability, disruption and facilitating tangible, positive change in the world.
Find out more about Tern at https://www.tern.eco/
Find Zoe on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoe-rowswell-3034a11/
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Transcript
Introduction to Sustainability and Disruption
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to the Untitled SEO Podcast. Now we don't just talk about SEO, we like to talk about disruption, sustainability and all of that good stuff. And sometimes I meet somebody who is very much focused on sustainability and disrupting a market. So I've got somebody like that here right now. So honoured guest, would you like to introduce yourself?
00:00:23
Speaker
Good morning, lovely to chat to you. So hi, I'm Zoe. I am the co-founder of a company called Turn Eco. Turn is a B2B retail tech solution that powers circular retail. So we help brands and retailers systematically recover product for reuse or resale and in the process creating new revenue streams, but also driving customer loyalty and lifetime value and helping save the planet.
00:00:53
Speaker
That's incredibly succinct, Zoe. I think that's very neat and tidy. I think we can tell that you may have said that before. We've been working on that one liner for a while, yes. It's excellent.
Zoe's Journey in Digital Retail
00:01:04
Speaker
Right, so before we kind of dig into kind of the actual mechanics and the ideas behind Turn, tell us a little bit about your past, because there's something I think listeners would find very interesting with regards to how you got started in e-commerce.
00:01:20
Speaker
Yeah, no problem. So my background has always been in retail and then in digital retail, starting from my first ever retail job, my first Saturday job, which was working on my uncle's market stall in Brixton Market, selling fabric on a Saturday. But my first job in digital retail came about when I was working at Disney Store
00:01:46
Speaker
on a separate project and that project was coming to an end and they were looking for someone to be their website coordinator for the first Disney store website and this was a time when people didn't really shop online, e-commerce wasn't a thing, not everyone had a computer at home and it was very slow and you dial up
00:02:08
Speaker
But we did have a computer at home and I loved the potential of the internet and so I was like, oh this sounds really exciting, something I really want to do. What year was this roughly? Early 2000s.
00:02:21
Speaker
2000s. I remember I had a job at the time as a webmaster. I don't think it's something that really exists anymore. But it was quite normal that if you had a computer on or understood a little bit about the internet, you could get a job as being I'm not saying you did this, you could get a job. So hey, you understand the internet. There you go. How about it? Yeah. Disney was a bit deeper than that.
00:02:44
Speaker
Well, I mean, I think it was very early days for everyone. I mean, it was quite unusual for a brand to have a retail website at that point. But I loved the opportunity and the potential. So I thought, oh, I really want to do this and applied for the job
Innovations and Challenges at Topshop
00:03:00
Speaker
and got here. And that was
00:03:02
Speaker
it had me hooked from there on and from there I was there for about a year and then I went on to work for Arcadia Group and most notably Topshop where I spent a significant portion of my career in the digital team there and when I first started there were two of us myself and a digital marketing expert and I used to have to beg the buyers to give us samples to put on the website because no one really understood what it was or why it was important and it was a distraction and
00:03:29
Speaker
you know, it was going to take sales away from physical retail stores. But you know, bit by bit, we worked on magic and the business grew. And when I left Topshop in 2017, I left a team of 50. And we've done some amazing things in my time there. I'm super proud of that experience and the team we built and the work that we did.
00:03:52
Speaker
I'd like to think that when I speak to people like you, there'll be kind of kids at universities in the future kind of looking back on case studies with things like this, because as you say, if you had to try and convince your suppliers to give you product to take photos of to put the pictures on the internet, I mean, that sounds obviously completely wild now, but you must have come across some hurdles, other hurdles that
00:04:18
Speaker
we couldn't that you possibly couldn't have foreseen. I mean, going from a team of two to 50 is amazing enough in its own right. But I mean, how did you how did you manage the expectations of the people who asked you to, to build this store, you know, for next, who asked you to kind of do something or was it just experimental?
00:04:38
Speaker
There was definitely a lot of experimenting. I mean a lot of the things that we did during that time were groundbreaking and new and no one had done them before and there weren't really processes and in some cases tools to allow us to do it. And we just found a way really and that's what was super exciting about it. And that's why I love digital. I mean it continuously evolves. There's always something new to try.
00:05:06
Speaker
something new to learn. But you know, you know, from launching the first, I mean, remember, we launched the first Facebook page for the Topshop. And you know, that was something new at that point, brands didn't really have Facebook pages. And you know, that went on to encompass a number of different social channels. And we launched international sites and
00:05:25
Speaker
had to work through, okay, well, what does internationalization look like? Is it just language? Is it proposition? Is it content? How do we grow the business in other markets that are not as familiar to us as the markets that we're currently working in?
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah, it was great. A really brilliant experience and excited to still be in the industry, but in a slightly different guise these days as well. But building on that sort of innovation and excitement and growth opportunities that were there in the first days of digital, but now I see within sustainability and retail as well. The previous guest I spoke to on this podcast, a guy called Marke Preston, who talks about the mindset of digital marketing and SEO.
00:06:12
Speaker
And I can see my interpretation of what you're saying is that it's spotting opportunities and it's finding novel ways to solve problems. And I think we're still there, especially with SEO. Obviously, I'm coming from this from an SEO angle. We are still in the Wild West. We are still kind of trying to figure out. I think it is. It's one of the things that's still exciting, especially when it comes to people who are prepared to try something disruptive. Now, the term disruption in business development has become
00:06:42
Speaker
a little overused I think and you know some people it's not disruption if you put a different type of cap on a pen for example but it is disruption if you introduce something that that can change the way a whole industry thinks about a particular
00:06:58
Speaker
angle. So I'm setting you up here, Zoe, to explain the mechanics of what you do at term. We had the pitch when I introduced you, and that's great. It's all very encompassing.
Sustainability Vision at Turn Eco
00:07:11
Speaker
But I'm interested in perhaps finding out a little bit more about what inspired you. When did you spot the opportunity to set up term? So I think over the last five to 10 years,
00:07:27
Speaker
My understanding and my knowledge and insight into the industry's impact on the environment has grown. And I've become much more aware of potentially the negative side, I guess, of especially a fast fashion, which is really where most of my retail and digital experience is from.
00:07:51
Speaker
and started to not feel particularly good about it, if I'm honest. Started to think, hang on a second, I don't know that this is where I want to be. I don't really want to be continuing to contribute to this consume, consume, consume mindset, this throwaway mindset. And thinking, how could I potentially use my skills and my experience, but to better effect?
00:08:19
Speaker
And my co-founder, Kate, who I had met at Topshop, we ran the digital team together there. We both went our separate ways after we'd left Topshop, working for other high street retailers. But we'd always stayed in touch. We really enjoyed working together. And we're constantly talking about what that might look like and how we might join forces again. And talking about what we were seeing in the market and having this same conversation around
00:08:46
Speaker
not feeling great about what we were doing and thinking that there was potentially opportunity to rethink the direction that we moved in and listening to our customers as well and sustainability was becoming more important to the customer.
00:09:00
Speaker
They were actively starting to seek out brands that were talking about being more sustainable, more responsible and offering solutions for it. And at the same time, we could see the rise in secondhand online, very much like when we first started in e-commerce and no one was doing that particularly well. Secondhand online wasn't
00:09:23
Speaker
and still isn't, to some extent, being done very well. And actually, that's originally where we thought we might, we might set our stall out. And we're looking to potentially launch a secondhand marketplace for children's goods, buggies, prams, pushchairs, etc, that, you know, people spend a lot of money on, and they hold their value. And, you know, there's, there's a big opportunity for it within in the secondhand market.
00:09:49
Speaker
But we wanted to learn more about what was going on in the industry and the challenges and the opportunities that sustainability and the circular economy could offer. So we actually ended up setting up our own digital consultancy at the end of 2019 to focus on sustainable retail. And through that and through our network and through continued conversations, I think what we realized was, whilst the secondhand marketplace for children's goods was a great idea, there actually was potentially a bigger opportunity.
00:10:19
Speaker
out there and that was really around enabling brands and retailers to recognise that sustainability was a business opportunity and build them the tools
00:10:35
Speaker
and the access to be able to embed circular programs directly into their business in a way that was frictionless, wasn't that difficult, wasn't that onerous, but that would really unlock the potential that these secondary markets can offer.
How Turn Eco's Trade-in App Works
00:10:54
Speaker
Because the reality is for many retailers at the moment, their customers are probably buying their products secondhand online already, just not from them. So recognizing that net zero targets and sustainable practices need to be thought about, need to be embedded into business. And what does that mean for you? How do you change your business?
00:11:17
Speaker
How do you build on what you've got but change your business model to integrate something that is better for the planet, that is better for your business and helps move you in the direction that your customers and stakeholders want you to move in.
00:11:31
Speaker
I think that's incredibly exciting. I mean, just to break it down into my kind of simple understanding, one of the challenges with any secondhand market is that you are selling a potentially very broad range of items from many different manufacturers. And, you know, there is eBay, which is to a certain extent a tap market, a lot of it. And the way that products are listed, described, photographed, all of those things are quite separate from
00:12:00
Speaker
the norms that have become more established in primary brand e-commerce. So if I understand it correctly, what you're saying is that if you are, I don't want to mention a brand because I want to kind of keep it neutral. Okay, well, let's put it this way. If your company is called Yesio Jeans, and you've sold 100,000 pairs of Yesio Jeans over a year, a proportion of those jeans are going to end up
00:12:29
Speaker
in landfill or are going to end up being a kind of a dead end in terms of sustainability because the carbon has been used in the manufacturer movement, shipping and running the website. So once those genes go in the bin that there's no carbon
00:12:49
Speaker
pullback. There's nothing coming back. So if the SEO genes – I've learned to like the idea of that – if the SEO genes are selling a million pairs, if we could get back 100,000 pairs of genes,
00:13:04
Speaker
In terms of listing those on an e-commerce website, we know what the products look like. We know what the range and the sizes are. We already know a lot more about our own products than we would about trying to sell other secondhand things. First of all, my understanding is that
00:13:23
Speaker
Yes, so the premise of Turn and our MVP is a trade-in or buyback app that allows brands and retailers to set up their own trade-in program so their customers can easily trade in their pre-owned items directly with the brand or retail that they bought them from and in exchange receive some credit to spend on a future purchase.
00:13:49
Speaker
In terms of the carbon footprint, I think that's a really interesting point of view and topic to unpick because the vast majority of a product's carbon footprint is in its initial manufacturing and production and transportation. So extending the life of that product through reuse or resale
00:14:12
Speaker
significantly reduces that carbon impact. Now, if as a brand you are committed to becoming more circular, becoming more sustainable, doing your part to get to net zero, you need to think about how you're going to continue to grow your business.
The Importance of Circularity for Retailers
00:14:31
Speaker
And circularity and embedding those programs directly into your business
00:14:37
Speaker
is the perfect way to do that. So if you run your own trade-in program and you allow your customers to trade in their product when they finish with it, directly back with you, you're creating your own supply chain of second-hand products for reuse or resale. And as you said, you know, you are the best position to know what to do with that product in the secondary market. You designed it, you made it, you know, you sold it, you've got all of that original data.
00:15:07
Speaker
But it also offers your customers a reason to buy from you in the first place, because if I know I buy jeans from your SEO jeans, when I'm done with them for whatever reason, maybe I don't like them, they don't fit me, maybe they've got a rip in them in an inopportune place and I don't know how to repair them. But if I know that I can trade them back in with you when I'm done with them, that is a reason for me to buy with you in the first place.
00:15:31
Speaker
And then the credit that you give me for trading those items in is a reason for me to continue shopping with you. Now, so it's a great customer acquisition and retention tool. And not only that, it's fully traceable, it's fully trackable. You know exactly what the impact of that trading is on your business and what your customer ongoing purchase frequency and loyalty is. You can track that and monitor it and really build your business based on that data.
00:16:01
Speaker
But the reality is that every retailer worldwide at some point in the next few years is going to have to be accountable for the full life cycle of their products. Legislation is going to force them to do that. We're seeing that in France and Germany coming to the fore at the moment. This is the way the world is going and their customers are actively looking to buy secondhand.
00:16:25
Speaker
wouldn't you want to own that experience? Wouldn't you want to own that relationship with the customer that you know, the pricing, the quality control, the imagery, all of that? Why would you leave that someone else? Absolutely. And it's interesting because we've seen this pressure and legislation in other industries. So the electrical industry has the unfortunately title we
00:16:49
Speaker
What happened in that meeting, but you've raised something there. So you've got the opportunity in retail now to say, let's get ahead of this. Let's actually be a part of the conversation. And I'm a very optimistic person, but I quite like the idea that
00:17:03
Speaker
When the kind of a pale stale and male committees meet to kind of form plans around the legislation for this that the organizations like turn and bigger retailers could be a part of that, but leading from the front.
00:17:19
Speaker
I think in other industries that have had this sort of legislation thrust upon them, they've started off on the back foot and immediately turned like almost ring fence the way they're already acting. But if you're in clothing and retail and you're saying, no, we're already doing these things and these are the things we've learned, and I think that bodes a lot more positively for the whole industry, really, for the whole future.
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, look, there's no doubt about it. Change is required and some, you know, vision and foresight of the direction of travel and the opportunity that circularity can deliver is required.
00:18:02
Speaker
changes hard and we are trying to make it easy and break down those barriers for retailers to build these programs directly into their business, but also break down the barriers for customers to participate. I think you mentioned eBay. I mean, obviously there is a huge amount of peer-to-peer resale happening already. We've got eBay, we've got vintage, we've got Depok, we've got Gantry, we've got Schvock, you know, all of these places.
00:18:28
Speaker
But not every customer wants to be a seller. You're not guaranteed a sale if you try and sell something on eBay. You also have to go through the process of photographing it, describing it, deciding what you're going to price it at, haggling with potential customers. And at the end of that, you may not even sell it. Or if you do, you might not get what you think is a decent amount for it.
00:18:52
Speaker
So the benefit from offering a brand-led service where I, as a consumer, can just go directly back to the retailer that I bought it from, there is a comfort level and an ease level within that because I know I can get rid of it responsibly.
Benefits of Brand-managed Resale Systems
00:19:09
Speaker
I know that product's not going to landfill. I'm getting a little bit of credit as a reward for doing so, but I also know I just feel good about what I'm doing because
00:19:20
Speaker
you know we've all got stuff in cupboards, wardrobes, lofts, sheds etc that you know we don't want to throw away because that feels wasteful and we don't want to contribute towards landfill we feel guilty about that but you also don't really know what to do with it so it either just sits there in cupboards gathering dust and there's no value recapture there for anyone
00:19:45
Speaker
Or more often than not, you sit on it for a while and then you just do end up throwing it away because you just haven't found any easy solutions to help you with that. Or in the case of you talked earlier about children's things, speaking as a parent, you just hope your friends start having children's that you can get. Well, I mean, there's a huge benefit to hand me down. So my kids definitely benefit from that from their older cousins, which is great.
00:20:12
Speaker
But not everyone has that network. It's, you know, seasons change, tastes change. But I think, you know, what we're trying to build is something and it's not specific to fashion either, although fashion is is a massive problem to solve. We're trying to build something that is accessible, that's affordable, that really drives change at scale by making it easy. So the no brainer solution to stuff that I don't want need or use anymore.
00:20:40
Speaker
So mechanically, we can see that from the consumer's perspective, it adds to that brand warmth, that fuzzy feeling about your favorite brands, because we know that if I buy something from these people, there is a root back for it. From brands, I can see the advantage that to a certain extent, they get to continue to protect their brand. So we know that premium brands
00:21:03
Speaker
will never allow their own channels to show items that are damaged or not quite perfect. So there's a sort of protection level there. Mechanically for the retailers and the manufacturers is my understanding that you actually have developed, I know you have an app that does this snap into existing e-commerce things or how does it work on a mechanical level?
00:21:28
Speaker
Yeah, so our MVP that's live currently is a plug and play trading app for Shopify using Shopify e-commerce platform.
Integrating Turn Eco with Shopify
00:21:41
Speaker
Shopify is a great launch platform for us. Obviously, the ambition is bigger. We want to be able to support all of the e-commerce platforms that are out there. And that's already working progress.
00:21:53
Speaker
But in essence, it's got three elements to it. It's a white label solution. It lives within the retailer's own website. So they're not losing traffic to a third party or to a secondary website. Customers come directly back to them. And there is a trading engine. So the customer can either identify from their order history, if it exists, or register a product if they got it via another channel, whether that's buying in a physical retail store. Maybe they bought it from a wholesale partner. Maybe it was gifted.
00:22:23
Speaker
But the customer can select the items that they want to trade in. They see an amount of credit that the retailer is willing to offer them for those items. It's a transparent service, and they know all the way through what they're going to get. Once they've selected the items they want to send back, we've got an integrated logistics solution. So based on the customer's location, we can tell them what are their local drop off points and carrier services available.
00:22:44
Speaker
and we give them a shipping label in order to send it back. And then once those goods have been received back by the retailer, we automatically trigger our credit to the customer on their behalf in the form of a discount code to be used on a future purchase. Now, we are all about the systematic recovery and recapture of product from customers back to the retailer.
00:23:05
Speaker
But the data that we have available to us that we can service to the retailer can then help facilitate re-listing for resale. It can be shared with a third party, if a 3PL warehouse provider, for example, who can receive those goods and reprocess them on a retailer's behalf. So we are like the enabler, if you want, and the data provider that then allows
00:23:32
Speaker
additional circular programs, whether that's resale, whether that's recycling or donation or upcycling, whatever that next best life that product is, the product has been recovered and the data is there to help facilitate those next best life solutions.
00:23:47
Speaker
There's another angle every time, as this conversation goes on, there's another angle to this little light bulbs popping off in my head here. So it's ultimately, it's very scalable because it's an app and because you are connecting the dots.
00:24:03
Speaker
For people I can see that it's scalable upwards kind of quite quite naturally You have I'm quite happy for you not to answer this but what's the the minimum entry? I mean it is this something that potentially could be available for what America's called mom-and-pop stores in the future
00:24:21
Speaker
So it was really really important to us when we first started this that we built a tool and a solution that was accessible and affordable for retailers of any
Affordable Solutions for SMEs
00:24:33
Speaker
size. This is I think what we see in the industry, especially a couple of years ago when we first started out, but you know still remains relatively true to date.
00:24:44
Speaker
is that a vast number of the solutions out there are for big business, for businesses that have big volumes of initial sales and have the financial and operational capabilities to tap into those services. We wanted to build something that was available to SMEs who make up, you know, 90-95% of the retail landscape.
00:25:07
Speaker
And so it's a plug and play solution. It is a tiered, monthly subscription-based service and our entry level is $100 a month.
00:25:20
Speaker
That's amazing. It sounds like I was leading you down that way, but I genuinely didn't know. I was trying to spot where the funnel was, as it were. No, $100 a month for SMEs. That almost makes it a no-brainer, especially while we're all looking for legitimate, measurable, real ways to minimize our impact on society and the planet.
00:25:47
Speaker
So Zoe, this has been really, really interesting. I think I could probably carry on talking to you for ages, but I'm just going to get more and more geeky about that side of it. So I really appreciate your time today. I mean, is there a core message you'd like to send out there as a nice kind of bookend for this conversation? I think my core message and the one thing that we want to really get out there is this is not as hard as you think it is.
00:26:16
Speaker
you can think of a million reasons not to do this but the benefits far outweigh the negatives. So come talk to us about how easy we can make it for you because we can get you set up with a trade-in and resale program really really quickly and you can start to see the benefits to your business pretty pretty swiftly. So yeah remember that it's not as hard as you think it is
00:26:41
Speaker
That's a fantastic end note there. Thank you ever so much for your time, Zoe. I'm going to say goodbye now. Would you like to say goodbye? Yep, thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed our conversation.