We’re pleased to announce that Emel Meteoglu, Vice President of Product at B-Inventory, has been named one of many  High 50 Girls Leaders of San Francisco for 2023 by Girls We Admire!

Emel is an completed govt and product chief with a ardour for constructing easy-to-use, helpful, and modern merchandise from the bottom up at a global scale, from defining the technical structure to getting ready to go to market technique. At B-Inventory, she leads a workforce liable for product growth, income progress, consumer expertise, analytics, and company and product technique.

Be taught extra about Emel’s background and imaginative and prescient for B-Inventory under.  

Q: Are you able to inform us a bit bit about your background?

“I went to highschool in Turkey for Product Administration Engineering. I do know it’s a cliché, however I knew from a younger age that I needed to develop into a product supervisor to bridge the hole between enterprise (gross sales, advertising and marketing, assist) and engineering.”

Q: What introduced you to B-Inventory?

“A few issues had been occurring in my life. One, I used to be prepared for a brand new journey, however I needed to do one thing significant. I needed to make use of my abilities to assist folks. The second factor occurring was, we’d simply gotten a home and I used to be procuring rather a lot, and shopping for furnishings—and sadly, I used to be returning a few of it. Because of the excessive price, should you pay full value and suppose the merchandise could also be broken, as an finish consumer, you wish to return it. You wish to make sure that in case you are paying full value, you’re getting the very best high quality doable. 

As she went by means of the method of returning a desk she’d ordered that arrived with a dent on it, her mother and father—who had been visiting—had been amazed by the versatile return insurance policies, which aren’t outstanding in Emel’s native Turkey: “If you wish to return one thing there, you actually should struggle. Even when it’s faulty, chances are you’ll not get your a reimbursement. The shopper just isn’t at all times proper.” 

This bought Emel pondering: within the midst of seemingly limitless returns, the place does the merchandise find yourself, and the way a lot waste is being generated? Is there a approach to cross these returned objects on to secondary finish customers and generate financial savings? The reply she got here up with was: by means of “second life givers;” Emel’s time period for consumers. And simply as she contemplated these prospects, B-Inventory reached out, as if by means of serendipity.

“I do know there are a lot of conventional  liquidation channels, however this trade is so fragmented and open to disruption. We will positively construct one thing helpful for everyone—retailers, resellers, and finish customers! Furthermore, this additionally bought me pondering that I can truly not solely assist folks, however assist Earth by giving these merchandise a second, third, fourth life. That actually drew me in. I’m lastly going to do one thing significant, so 10 years from now I can inform my children the platform we constructed helped deliver billions of returned merchandise again to life. I’m very enthusiastic about what we will construct. The alternatives that we will create for resellers and for fixing inefficiencies, and the ache factors that we will resolve for retailers is limitless. As I inform my very own workforce, sky’s the restrict. We simply have to focus and construct it proper.”

Emel’s imaginative and prescient for B-Inventory goes past promoting overstock to vetted consumers—it means that we will develop into a serious participant within the gig economic system, fostering the way forward for consumers and serving to them not solely develop, however study alongside the way in which:

Q: How do you envision B-Inventory enabling folks to develop into elite consumers?

“Uber has 900,000 drivers within the U.S. It’s not unrealistic to think about having a million second life givers assist us discover returned merchandise second properties. 

The variety of second life givers is simply restricted by the variety of adults within the inhabitants, and also you don’t even should personal a automobile to start out your facet hustle! Because of this I imagine the sky’s the restrict: we will prolong our platform in a manner that we may also help second life givers begin their enterprise in the event that they don’t know the right way to begin; assist them create their very own web site, acquire a enterprise license, or present training: Enterprise 101. We’ll stroll with them, facet by facet from the start. We’ll assist them construct, handle, and develop their enterprise in order that increasingly folks can do that job and assist us deliver extra merchandise into life.

Q: What’s your imaginative and prescient for sellers?

On the vendor facet, we want to consider how we will onboard extra merchandise onto our platform. How can we make sellers’ lives simpler? How can we combine extra into the vendor so it’s much less cumbersome for them and it’s straightforward to add the stock in our system? How will we resolve different issues for them by means of scanning, lotting, and sorting?”

Q: Sooner or later, what do you hope you possibly can say you probably did with B-Inventory?

“I’m envisioning that there might be state legal guidelines that say no reusable product goes to landfill; it have to be resold. I  would additionally prefer to see B-Inventory because the ecosystem of giving merchandise a second life, in order that it connects all of the gamers, similar to returns and stock administration companies, logistics, warehouses and achievement facilities, and even different liquidators!

After I see these two issues taking place, I’ll say we made it: we created a platform to save lots of Earth. And that’s what I’ll attempt so long as I’m right here.”

Requested what her necessities are for working with a product or firm, Emel had this to say:

“As a product supervisor and chief, serving to others is what motivates me. I wish to construct helpful merchandise which are straightforward to make use of and modern. These are my three standards:

It ought to disrupt the prevailing trade and the methods through which we function.
It must be helpful to others by addressing their ache factors and offering worth.
It must be intuitive and easy.”