Jess Owens, CEO of Sustainable Startup Greenlist

So we’ve got CEO and founder. Jess Owens.

Hi, Jess. Hi. How are you? It’s great to see you, Jess. And I know each other for about a year And I’ve been impressed with Jess’s creation Greenlist. I think it serves so many functions that the retail industry needs right now from protecting our planet to improving profitability for retailers.

Jess Owens: So Greenlist is a technology that enables peer-to-peer returns, skip the trip back to a store or warehouse, and go directly to a waiting consumer. When we cut out those middle steps, we save stores, time, hassle, and money. And we also enable the most sustainable approach to returns.

Christine Russo: What inspired you.

Jess Owens: Well, it was a user problem. I was shopping online and a jacket sold out in my shopping cart. I called the store. And I said, can you connect me to a return of the jacket? Because I knew the jacket would get returned. That store couldn’t do that. No store does that. So I set out to solve my own problem. But what I quickly realized is that the industry is incredibly pollutive and returns play a big part of that.They’re shipped across the country. They pile up in warehouses, they’re thrown away. They’re shipped to Chile where they’re burned. As I continue to think about this problem and the impact that returns have, I thought the most sustainable approach to return is to send the jacket directly from my house to your house, because you want it: Peer to Peer returns.