In The Room with Andy Ruben
In the Season 4 finale of The Room Podcast, Madison and Claudia sit down with Andy Ruben, Founder and CEO of Trove, an end-to-end technology and supply chain platform, unlocking second hand shopping for your favorite brands. Before founding Trove, Andy served on the senior leadership team at Walmart, including the role of Chief Sustainability Officer. A big congratulations to Trove who recently announced their $77.5M Series D funding. With the resale and e-commerce space expected to hit $64B in annual sales by 2028, Trove is at the forefront of enabling top-tier brands like Patagonia, REI, and Lululemon to capture this rapidly growing market.
This week’s episode covers key themes such as how we empower sustainable consumption, the art of the reframe, and building a business in a supply constrained market. Let’s open the door.
Season 4 is sponsored by our friends at Silicon Valley Bank and Cooley.
Key Theme 1: Empowering sustainable consumption
As a former Chief Sustainability Officer of Walmart, Andy has seen up front the efforts large Fortune 500 companies are making to unlock more sustainable experiences. He shared a poignant example of how in attempting to build more sustainable products you can actually create net more waste. He highlighted a moment where Walmart made plastic forks with 11% less plastic, seemingly a win!, But in turn, sold more forks than ever before. This created net more plastic waste. It can be easy to think in binaries as we approach solving for this important problem that impacts us all. Is this more sustainable than that? However, Andy challenges us to ask this question differently, how might we consume in an entirely more sustainable way through shifting our paradigm for what consumption means?
Key Theme 2: The art of the reframe
“Things get reframed all the time when they get reframed well, we don’t realize they were reframed.”
Andy remarked on the power of a truly good reframe. He highlighted moments over the past 15 years where start-ups have re-imagined what it was like to do simple actions, call a car, book a room in a new city, etc. When you take a step back, each of these consumer needs were time-old experiences. Carpooling or staying a night in a new city were essentially re-imagined by Uber or Airbnb. Trove reframes how we think about consumption specifically in the context of fashion. Through partnering with retailers, they unlock trust for customers in second purchases with the authority of the brand behind the experience. This is distinctly different then any other resale purchase online today. Claudia, unbeknownst to her, experienced this exact moment on Lululemon recently which we delightfully discovered in our conversation.
Key Theme 3: Building a business in a supply constrained market
In any marketplace business, there are supply and demand constraints. We asked Andy what is the most challenging problem for Trove; is it harder to find items to resell or customers willing to buy them? Andy was clear, they are supply constrained. If Trove found 5 million more patagonia’s to resell, he believes they would resell them. This dynamic in their marketplaces has led to innovation on uploading items and streamlining the process of getting items online more quickly. If you’re building a marketplace business, Andy has some additional helpful insights on how to build out both sides of the market well.
That’s a wrap on season four of The Room Podcast! Thank you so much to all of our guests and listeners for joining us in The Room. We’ll be back later this year with our fifth season. If you have any guests requests or feedback — we’d love to hear from you! Shoot us a note at madison@theroompodcast.com with any thoughts.
You can find all episodes of The Room Podcast on all audio streaming platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
