NSS Sustainability Inspired Successes: Disney Petit, LiquidDonate

So thank you all for being here. I invite you to lean in, jot down an idea or two that stretches your thinking, and bring your curiosity to the Q&A, which we will open up at the end of Disney's lecture. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Disney Petit!

Thanks so much, Kelly. It is a pleasure to be here with you all, and to introduce Liquidonate to you.

Uh, if you haven't heard about us yet. So, hi everyone. As Kelly said, my name is Disney Petit. I am the founder and CEO here at Liquidonate.

And yes, my name is Disney, which means that I was meant to build a magical kingdom of, uh, waste diversion, so… Uh, jokes aside, though, my team and I built this company out of frustration, watching brand new products get thrown away because there just wasn't an easy, compliant, or automated path to donation.

Retailers have incredible technology for moving goods to customers, but when it comes to moving goods out of the system responsibly, it's still emails, spreadsheets, and wishful thinking. And that's the gap that we're willing to fill here.

Prior to founding the company, I was the 15th employee at Postmates, uh, where I spent about a decade building out last-mile delivery logistics as we know it today.

Uh, in 2024, as Kelly mentioned, our company was, um, a finalist for Fast Company's World Changing Idea.

And in 2021, I was part of an organization and a company that won a Time Magazine Invention of the Year award.

Uh, called a product… for a product called Bento, that was the first… product that enabled folks who didn't have access to smartphones to text the word hungry to a specific phone number and receive a free meal from the nearest Postmates pickup restaurant, paid for on the back end by a foundation.

Um, and uh, since then, we've just continued to grow and see how technology can impact.

This space. So, being at Postmates for 10 years, I saw a lot of the problems around food waste.

And a lot of you know that. You know, almost 40% of edible food in the United States ends up in the trash.

Uh, which is a big problem, but myself and my friends and a lot of folks in the community.

Have built a lot of great products around food rescue and food recovery. So, once Postmates was acquired by Uber, I knew I wanted to go out and solve the next biggest problem, which is retail waste.

You might not know this, but 8 out of 10 returns end up in the landfill, because it's just not cost-effective for them to take it back.

And so, thinking about scale, in 2024 alone, nearly $900 billion worth of merchandise was returned.

And that turned into 9 billion pounds of material that ended up in the landfill. And a lot of times, these are perfectly good products.

Most folks have no idea that when they're making a return, the likely end of life for that product is ending up in the landfill. Most folks think that it's going to be restocked, but it's just not the case.

And so, why does this happen? Well, retailers are really not optimized… are only optimized for things like speed and revenue, not for redistribution.

The systems that power fulfillment, WMS, RMS, OMS. We'll get to those acronyms a little bit later. These systems were never designed to make doing the right thing the easy thing or the profitable thing.

And the irony is, is that most companies and most people do actually want to do better. They have ESG goals, they have waste reduction targets, they have sustainability reports, but there's a real black hole when it comes to what happens after the point of sale, and that's where technology and automation, like Liquid Donate, can bridge the gap.

And so, why now? Well, you might be wondering what is going on in the world that might make it the right time for a retailer to need a service like Liquidonate, and why they would choose to adopt a new technology right now.

And if you're not in the warehouse and retail space, you might not be familiar, but warehouses are under immense pressure due to a sharp increase in e-commerce buying and returns, facing rising costs and shipping, handling, and storage.

In a bit, we have a slide that kind of goes through the breakdown of what all the costs are that are actually associated with a return on the retailer side.

But for a quick preview, it costs a retailer, on average, $15 to accept a return, and so you can start to see this process of how ineffective and how non-cost effective it is for them to take back most returns.

The second, uh, point is that for years, retailers have been forced to Amazon's free shipping and returns policies. So Amazon, Amazon.com is a huge player in this space. They are the ones who set the rules for what happens in retail.

If they make a policy change or a decision around a different way that they're going to do packaging or shipping, most of the industry has to follow suit, for good or for bad.

Uh, if one-day shipping is now the standard. That's now the standard, and a lot of retailers have to work to try to fight against the convenience and price.

Power that Amazon has in order to stay competitive. Um, number three, keep at returns for unprofitable items have been resulting in a 16% year-over-year increase in fraud.

So, this is something else that Amazon really pioneered, the Keep It return. Being able to say, hey, whenever a customer goes to return a product that we know we don't want back.

Because we're not gonna restock it for a value that makes sense to us.

Tell the customer to keep the item. And now. The National Retail Federation says that 13.7% of return attempts in 2024 were fraudulent.

And so, for that 13.7% of attempts. Those items were not, uh, sent back. The customer was allowed to keep them and get a refund.

But, for the other majority of folks who actually wanted to return that product, they were told to keep it. And so now the onus was put on the customer.

To get rid of that product, whether that meant they were gonna throw it away themselves, whether they were going to decide to use it anyway, give it away, who knows? But that just means lots and lots of usable product is sitting around in places where people did not actually want the goods.

And I believe that the onus should be on the retailer here.

And so our solution helps to make sure that those products are actually leaving the home.

Of the person who didn't want them. Retail sales are also threatened by new and unpredictable tariffs, forcing manufacturers to pass these extra costs on to these already price-sensitive consumers. I think a lot of us are already feeling this squeeze on a financial basis, and so…

Having these additional costs passed on to the consumer is not always a viable option.

And then, of course, 37% of Gen Z and Millennials have already switched brands due to a lack of social or environmental responsibility being outlined by a company. And so these five factors are five of the factors that we believe.

Mean that we are in the right place at the right time.

And when we think about our mission, our mission is to accelerate the world's transition to a circular economy.

And if you're on this call today, you likely know what that is, but the simplest way that we typically describe circular economy for folks who are maybe newer to this concept is that it's the reuse part of the reduce, reuse, recycle paradigm that we all learned in elementary school.

Uh, if you're interested in more on the circularity side and kind of how that works from start to finish.

There's a great book I recommend called Cradle to Cradle. I definitely think it's a strong and smart read, uh, for everyone if you haven't had a chance to read it yet.

They have their own definitions of circularity, and it's about building the end of life into the product from the beginning. Uh, and I think that that's definitely a huge part of this, but when we're thinking about how do we make sure that.

who are not familiar with this circular economy piece can get involved.

We want to say it's the reuse part. How do we make sure that things have an extension of life and stay in the reuse cycle?

So, how do we accomplish our mission? So, here is how we do that. Liquid Donate is a software that integrates directly with the retailer's existing tech stack.

So, warehouses, returns, inventory management systems, all of those acronyms that we talked about earlier.

We actually automatically route the unsellable or excess goods to the vetted nonprofits instead of liquidation or disposal.

Through their existing systems. Our algorithm considers the product type, location, weight, and the nonprofit's current needs in order to make sure that we are finding the best match for those products in real times.

We handle the logistics, from shipping labels to tax documentation, and we provide full traceability, where it went, who it helped, and what impact it made. It's faster, cheaper, and more measurable than traditional salvage or waste channels that folks are going through today.

So, you can take, uh, you can imagine. On the left side, there's a brand or a retailer. Let's say that it is a water bottle that you bought online from a company.

Um, or in store. But you decide that you want to make a return.

Today, what would happen is that that product, we would go back to the… you would go back to the store, or go online to make that return, and if that retailer was using, Liquid Donate, and they knew they didn't want to try to resell that water bottle for whatever reason.

We would instantly produce a shipping label for a nonprofit that wants that item, within about 30 miles of that storefront or your home, if you're returning it from your home, so that we can keep that item in a hyper-local state.

And also automatically produce a tax receipt for the retailer, so that they're able to actually recoup some additional value from that. And then, of course.

With most water bottles being plastic, we're also keeping that product out of the landfill. So a nonprofit is able to get a product that they need and that they want.

Uh, and it is not going into the landfill. And so we believe this is a true win-win-win solution. Everyone benefits from using Liquid Donate.

And we don't want to force sustainability onto these retailers for sustainability's sake. There has to be a business case here.

Um, and that business case is to align incentives, and so retailers are saving on hauling and landfill fees. They gain on ESG metrics that they can actually report.

And these nonprofit communities are able to get these new or like-new items at no cost, and only what they need.

Things that otherwise wouldn't be reaching them. Of course, we also see this as a win for the planet, because there's less product going into the landfill and lower emissions.

Uh, you know, once again, just referencing the types of folks who are going to be interested in a seminar like this, you're probably familiar with the triple bottom line. Um, that's another way that this is often.

Often described as building a company with a triple bottom line, and so that's what we're working to do here.

And so, I'll go through our platform. So, we made our platform super easy to use, and I know there's a lot of questions about scalability, and so the reason I'm showing this demo is not.

Because I expect anyone here to be a retailer who would use this, but because I want to show you how I believe you have to design a product with the end user in mind in order to get conversion, to reach scale.

So, we have an easy-to-use online platform, and so… we wanted to focus on easy. Like, it has to be easier than doing the thing they're doing today. And so, we integrate directly into the systems that they have, we made it super simple, and we worked directly with the folks who would be using this system to design it.

Those are all key elements in how to build something that is scalable on the technology side.

In order to make it work for folks. So, we have two products in our suite.

First is our warehouse direct product. This is simply a web app that allows the retailer to donate from their warehouse by the box, the pallet, or the truckload.

It's a super simple system. They go in, and they start a bulk donation, they upload the type of product that they have.

They tell us the location where it's at. Um, because they can have multiple different warehouses around the country, and then basically click submit.

And our team is able to do the rest from there.

That means that we are going to… review the donation, we are going to, uh, get the nonprofit matched with it, that once those products.

And we're going to schedule a courier service that is appropriate for the product, whether that is.

A semi-truck, whether it is a shipping label, whether it is a local moving service, whatever it is, we have created all of those integrations to shop for, um, the best price.

For the item to be moved, because… Price is king here, or queen for the nonprofits.

Uh, and for the retailers themselves, because they're trying to recoup as much money as possible.

This doesn't require any integration. Like, this software, a retailer could find out about us and start using today.

Our second product is our Returns Direct product, and this returns product means that the retailer is able to actually download our Shopify app or integrate our API into their returns.

Web portal, so that when a customer goes online to make a return.

If it's a product that pulls up from their order that they actually don't want to receive back, when they click submit on the return, it's actually going to provide them a shipping label for a non-profit.

That is interested in receiving that product. Then, that item is then matched directly to that local nonprofit.

The benefit to the retailer here is that that shipping label is, on average, 60% less.

Then what they would typically pay for that product to go to a warehouse.

It completely reduces the opportunity for fraud. The customer only gets a refund if the product is actually, um, going, uh.

Like, is shipped out for the… with the tracking label. Uh, or the shipping label with tracking.

And, uh, the nonprofit is now able to receive this item with an automated tax receipt.

So, those are the principles that we like to think about when building a technology product. One, how do we get them to be able to use it today? We built a web app.

Then, also, how do we not only take care of what is in the warehouse, but how do we prevent it from filling up again?

We built the Returns Direct product. And so that's really the way that we think about how do we solve this problem.

And so how we lower costs for retailers, our secret to making donation affordable is that we also scale. So we thought a lot about how do we build the technology in.

To make it easy for retailers to adopt this, especially because it's a new idea.

And how do we scale as a company to keep up with the volume? So, we actually built out a network of over 4,000 circularity partners, meaning there is, like, one nonprofit.

Near every DC across the United States, at least. We built a proprietary matching algorithm that instantly matches these items, regardless of size, number, or even category.

And then we also have, uh, seamless and low-lift integration into the existing systems, those WMS, RMS, OMS, those systems I talked about at the beginning. We don't want them to have to go somewhere else to do something. Now, if they want to simply use the web app because they don't want to integrate.

Great, we have an option for that, but I think that was a real unlock for us, was thinking about how do we do this in a way that is seamless through an integration, but also.

Gives them the option to do it without an integration. On the pricing here, so this is where we really wanted to break down.

Why the… why this is a win for the retailer. A lot of… folks are not familiar with how expensive it is to throw things away. Um, and so on the.

On the warehouse side, with our warehouse direct product, typically a retailer is paying around $2.57 to landfill a usable product.

With Liquid Donate, we bring that cost down to $1.38 per item, and so there are cost savings associated with this. Uh, and this is on the bulk side. Almost every retailer you talk to will have some product sitting in a warehouse somewhere they want to donate, and we can make it cheaper for them to do that.

But the real win here is on returns. And so, not only clearing out their warehouse, but making sure that their returns are ending up in the right place.

Is… and not back at a warehouse, where they're just gonna sit there forever. So, a traditional return is costing a retailer $15 per item.

To make it back to the warehouse, just to be put in the trash a majority of the time.

So, retailers are spending $3 to $10 per item on a traditional return management platform. Uh, shipping, $8.50, is kind of the typical average we took here. There's a handling fee, because you may not know this, but every time your product is handled at a warehouse, a lot of times there is a fee associated per item.

Then the item is sitting there in storage, meaning that there is non-sellable product there, uh, because it's being taken up by something that is unsellable.

Then there's a transit fee and a landfilling fee. And so, this is the breakdown on why it costs so much money to process a return for a retailer when 8 out of 10 times, it's ending up in the trash.

Now, with Liquid Donate, we charge a service fee. Here, we have our base price, which is $4.

We have it here as an example. Then we have discounted shipping. Not only are we.

Pre-coordinating rates with the, uh, shipping companies themselves, but we're also doing that hyper-local matching. Um, that hyper-local matching means that we're able to reduce the cost of that shipping label, because we're significantly reducing the distance.

Then, of course, instead of the donation, there's no handling, storage, transit, or landfilling fees associated with it.

And then we've automated the tax receipt process, and so if the retailer is able to take advantage of the tax receipt, we actually have retailers that are earning 6 cents on their returns versus spending $15 on their returns.

We work with a number of different companies, um, we're category agnostic. This is something else that was really important to me when we started building the company, is how do we make sure that not only are we serving the apparel companies that have this problem, but how do we also serve.

This very underserved. Community of folks that are doing big and bulky items. So, room and board is a company that I love to highlight. They are a furniture company, if you're not familiar with them. They make really beautiful stuff.

And the ability to take something that is big and bulky and return it is an expensive process, and so what we've done is we've implemented that same magic match technology we built for returns.

For the shippable items for these big and bulky items as well. And that's been a real game changer for the furniture and the oversized industry.

In terms of what we've done so far, in the last 4 years, we've donated over 12 million items.

As I said, we have over 4,000 nonprofits in our network, um, and we've donated over $130 million worth of product that otherwise would have ended up.

In the trash. To go through a few case studies before I wrap up, we work with a company called Built Different, and they sell the best-fitting t-shirts for big and tall men.

And in 2024, they saw a 26% reduction in shipping costs by using our product.

And my favorite metric for a group like this is that it saved 3.9 million miles in transit.

So, typically, the product will go from the customer's home to a warehouse. That customer's home could be anywhere in the United States, or Canada.

And the warehouse is typically on the East Coast or the west coast of the United States.

That's a long transit distance, and so instead, we're actually doing that hyper-local matching, which means that we're bringing down those carbon emissions.

We also have a quote here from one of the nonprofit partners who received these products, and they said, we are so appreciative of the donations. Our clients are loving having such quality new items in their size in our free clothing closet.

Um, it's easy to forget. Why we're doing this, and so we always try to bring it back, uh, to the nonprofits and the mission that we're working toward.

We have an enterprise company that we work with. They make packaged snacks, and in 6 months, um, of last year.

For this case study, they donated 173 pallets of product. The fair market value of the product was $2.9 million, and because we were able to donate it, we diverted 218,000 pounds from the landfill and supported a number of different communities.

This is a… an enterprise example on the tax saving side for an upscale furniture and housewares brand.

Uh, they make $7.7 billion a year in revenue. Their unsellable inventory is $38 million. Their total COGS is $4.4 billion, that's their cost of goods sold.

And they're qualified charitable deduction is $30 million. So we did an estimate on their tax savings and decided that based on the information they provided to us, along with the information provided by their accountant.

That we believe that we would be able to save them, uh.

3 quarters of a million dollars a year on their… on their taxes if they were to be using the Liquid Donate service.

And as far as the retail partners that we work with today, we have continued to try to foster a really, really strong relationship with them.

Including with room and board. They say that we're crucial to their aggressive goal of diverting 90%.

Of operational waste from landfills by 2030. The reason that I'm pointing this out is because when I started the company.

It was difficult for me to really lean into this. This positivity that we were getting from our customers. It was something that I, and I know a lot of other founders who have a…

You know, an activist-type background, we kind of shy away from this, but you really have to highlight.

Uh, the positive work that you're doing in order to get additional customers to continue to meet your mission. And so, that's definitely something that.

I would share there. Uh, nonprofits, we always like to go back to them.

It's an… it's awesome, uh, to hear and, like, see the direct feedback, especially when you are someone who is… Uh, providing a software service, it's not necessarily true that you get to see the outcome, and so getting to see these quotes and the photos of the products makes a big difference.

We've also been very lucky to win, um, a ton of awards and have a lot of different accolades, uh, for the product that we've built so far. Building a product-defining category, a first of its kind product, is very scary.

Uh, and so to be recognized, um. Over time, for a lot of these different.

Different awards and accolades has been really wonderful, uh, including. The opportunity to speak to you all today.

Um, and so I would love to open it up for any questions that you have. With Liquid Donate, we're here to reduce waste and lower operational costs with one single service.

And, uh, I hope that this presentation has been interesting, helpful, uh, and I would love to answer any questions that you all might have.

Amazing, amazing, amazing. Disney, thank you so much. So y'all can see why she is just such a good fit for, um, this series and for this webinar.

For a Wednesday afternoon. So, we did have some questions, um, prior to this.

And I think you've covered almost all of them about scalability. I think the only one that wasn't covered was, um, how… Like, do you have a lineup, or how are… how are you engaging with new partners?

I think it was about retailers.

Yeah, so with, um, with retailers or nonprofits, or both. So, retailers, we are going through, like, a very traditional sales motion.

So, we work on… talking to a retailer.

Finding out what their, um… what their pain point is around returns. Luckily, we're in a space where we know that most retailers have a problem with returns.

Uh, and so we typically can go in and say, hey, like, we've built software.

That is able to… don't, like, is able to… that is better, it's easier and cheaper to donate with Liquid Donate than it is to do whatever it is that you're doing today. And we've built something that we feel very confident in that. Every once in a while, we'll talk to a retailer who says, oh, it's not a problem we have, and so that's fine, it's not a fit for us.

But going through that traditional sales motion is something that is, um… is painful, you get a lot of no's. Uh, but at the same time, it's something you have to do.

Uh, and so… continuing to release marketing material.

Um, sending emails, communicating with retailers, asking for referrals. Those are all ways that we do it, and definitely what the case studies were born from was retailers wanting to see other retailers who were using the product and having success stories.

I love it, I love it. And so, when I look at the, um, the guest list of who signed up today, it is quite global. So what… what do you think the applicability is for this as a global solution?

Because obviously your case study and you're really based in the U.S, but where… what's the… what's the world's opportunity?

Yeah, so our product currently today is available in the United States and Canada.

We have done some donations in the United Kingdom, and there is a lot of exciting work happening in Europe on the EPR and the digital product passport side, and so we are very eager, uh, to move into the European market as well.

Our product is completely scalable. There's a few things that we will have to do or change in order to make it work for those markets.

Uh, but what we're doing is we've decided to take a… a client-based approach.

So, when we have a client that would like to expand their, uh, our product offering into another country outside of the US or Canada, we will grow with them.

And so, that is the way that we are taking on international markets.

Oh, nice. Such a good idea. Okay, we have a question from MD Rahan. Uh, would you like to ask yourself?

I think I've just passed you the mic. So you can… if you see down below…

Click on… unmute yourself, and you can ask the question yourself.

You can read it out loud, too, if not, I can see it.

Hopefully this works.

Okay.

All right, so the question, thank you, is, uh, does your business model work for used products, or just only for returned products?

So, our product today is a, um… is for commercial use. We're a B2B, a business-to-business SaaS software today.

Um… The main product we have is for returns, because returns are such a big problem, and they're in very usable condition. People typically return something because it was unused, and that's the type of stuff that nonprofits really want and need.

Um, and so, used products are something that can be done.

On a case-by-case basis, um, a lot of times we work with retailers who are clearing out their warehouses, and they have, like, old fixtures, um, that were in stores and things like that.

And so, as long as the condition of the item is noted in the listing, then we can find a match for it.

Typically, if something is beyond its typical life, useful life, as it stands in a current.

Position. We will work with an upcycler or a recycler to find the appropriate disposition outcome for that, but we're really a donation-first product.

I love it. I love it. Okay, thank you for the question. Um… Yeah, I just… I find the whole story, I find the… the experience, your experiential learning, and going from Postmates to, um, to this.

Understanding the need and doing this development, and then just kind of this iteration, learning, continuing to grow, is just so perfect, and just so, um, how so many sustainability practitioners thrive. Like, we… We see the need, we see the gap in the market, or the gap in research, or the gap in opportunity, and we just move into that direction.

Um, I don't want to keep anybody any longer. It is lunchtime for us on the East Coast, it's coffee time for you all on the West Coast.

I see some people from Southeast Asia, so it's, you know, kind of bedtime for you as well.

So if you have any follow-up questions, feel free to reach out to the NSS, and we can, um, connect you to Disney. Disney, thank you so, so much for your time, for your wisdom, um, and your generosity.

Yeah, of course, it was a pleasure to be here, and I appreciate everyone who tuned in.

Bye, everybody!