Latest / Talk Commerce / LiquiDonate Is Turning Retail Waste Into Community Impact Through Sustainable Donations with Disney Petit
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:02.811) Welcome to this holiday edition of Talk Commerce. Today I have Disney Petit here again. Disney is the founder of Liquid Donate. Disney, go ahead, tell us your day-to-day role. Give us one of your passions and anything fun and new that we didn't talk about last time. Disney Petit (00:20.137) Yeah, well, thanks so much for having me Brent. Hi, everyone. My name is Disney Petit. My pronouns are she and her. I'm based here in the Bay Area, and I am the founder and CEO at Liquid Donate. And Liquid Donate is a software platform that works with retailers and brands to help them donate all of their excess inventory and unsellable returns to nonprofits and schools instead of having all of that stuff end up in the landfill. What I'm passionate about is absolutely stopping waste. making sure that things that are already in existence find the most useful life. And the most exciting things that have happened since the last time we spoke was that we really dug in on a new core product called Warehouse Direct, which we can talk about a bit, as well as really focused on big and bulky donations. So things like furniture, mattresses, things that are uniquely difficult to get out of a home or back into a box or. Things like that. So just complicated logistics, making it easier and cheaper for retailers to donate it than to throw it away. Brent Peterson (01:21.602) Yeah, I was going to donate my bouncy castle and I thought that would be a perfect one, but then somebody mentioned it could be deflated. So that kind of deflated my sense of purpose. Disney Petit (01:34.807) I'm sorry, we could have gotten it donated for you. Brent Peterson (01:38.542) Which leads me to my next thing is the free joke project and that wasn't the free joke I know everybody's hysterically laughing, but I do have a joke all you have to do is give me a rating 8 through 13 And we have two today So here we go What do you call the world's smallest? Amusement park Disney Petit (01:53.303) Okay. Brent Peterson (02:04.12) Disney Petit. Disney Petit (02:05.993) Okay, that one gets the full 13 points because no one has made that joke before and that's a hard thing to do with with my name. I've heard almost every joke. Brent Peterson (02:09.006) You Brent Peterson (02:16.43) All right. Thank you. All right, so now the second joke. How much does Santa pay to park his sleigh? Disney Petit (02:23.223) I don't know how much. Brent Peterson (02:26.069) Nothing, it's on the house. Disney Petit (02:28.194) it's on the house. Why did the hipster burn his mouth? Brent Peterson (02:36.704) Why? Disney Petit (02:37.685) because he drank his coffee before it was cool. That's all I got. Brent Peterson (02:40.842) Okay, that's a good one. All right. All right, so I feel like we should have one more. I don't know why, but this morning I coughed up. Yeah, you go, you do one more. Disney Petit (02:46.775) You Disney Petit (02:50.785) I mean, I have another one, but I feel like I must've said it last time. Why didn't the lifeguard save the hippie? Because he was too far out, Yeah, I just have two in my brain and those are the ones. Brent Peterson (02:56.75) Let's go do it. I don't know. Brent Peterson (03:05.068) I think you did tell them that was a good one. Brent Peterson (03:12.652) Yeah, mine come to me like just as I'm talking to people and I usually keep my mouth shut. That's what everybody tells me. So, all right, let's get into what's really exciting because we have limited time. Although we could do a whole, we should do a whole episode just on jokes. So yeah, you kind of, in the green room, you talked about your three core products. so kind of give us a highlight of those, but I'm really interested in the bulk one. I think that's very exciting because I think it's... Disney Petit (03:19.34) Mm. Disney Petit (03:27.935) I love it. Disney Petit (03:34.231) Mm-hmm. Brent Peterson (03:42.499) Like you buy a mattress at Costco and it comes up and it comes in a little tiny box and suddenly it literally expands to the size of your house. And then what do you do with it? Right? Like it comes in a, you know, it comes in a box that you could fit a bag of carrots in and suddenly you've got something that's bigger than you can never, you can't move it. So talk a little bit about the donation of bulky items, also the warehouse one I think is also really interesting. Disney Petit (03:49.877) Yep. Exactly. Disney Petit (04:08.511) Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'll start with the mattress piece since you just brought it up. So, I mean, this is a problem that a lot of companies that sell big and bulky items like mattresses have. It's really convenient to sell a product like a bed in a box, because like you said, it can get really small, it can get compressed. And then the customer is able to have that shipped directly to their doorstep. So convenience, convenience, convenience. Then once the customer opens up the product and it inflates, The product is no longer going to fit back in that box. And so the retailer is hoping that the customer really enjoys it. But if the customer doesn't like that product, for whatever reason, a lot of these companies that do a bed in a box solution are providing free 30, 90 or a hundred night trials to make sure that you feel confident about the product that you're buying from them. And so what happens today is you'll go online to say, Hey, I want to return this. And these companies right now are telling customers to keep the product. or donate it locally. And if you're a single person, you're living in an apartment, there's a lot of different places where you might not have access to a vehicle, where donating that mattress on its own, just logistically, can be really complicated if you don't want to keep the product. It's very expensive for the retailer to send somebody to come pick up that product and then take it to a mattress recycler as well. And most of the time those mattresses are not able to be resold by the company themselves anyway. And so there's just been a lot of problems around the coordination of getting these mattresses where they need to go. And so what we've done is that we've built a matching algorithm that is able to determine which nonprofit is the best fitting nonprofit for a mattress of a specific type of quality and condition in a specific area. and coordinate the logistics of getting it to that nonprofit when the customer wants to make the return. It's super simple for the customer. We knew that we had to make it easier than doing anything else in order for the customer to really opt into this process. So what happens is if you go online to return a mattress to a company that is working with us, instead of being told to keep it or return it on your own, you're now going to see a pickup scheduler. Disney Petit (06:25.387) that will enable you to select three dates and times that you are available for someone to come to your place, pick up the mattress and deliver it to the appropriate location. Now we're taking it to a nonprofit site directly. So there's no additional warehousing fees. There's no additional costs associated with having to store that mattress overnight, things like that. And so the nonprofit has opted in to receive this mattress and then they're going to give it to the appropriate person for direct service needs. then the non-profit receives the tax receipt on the back end. I'm sorry, the retailer receives the tax receipt on the back end. And so we've really taken this really cumbersome process and turned it into just a few quick steps that are all automated, not only on behalf of the customer, but also on behalf of the retailer and really bringing that returns and donation process into the 21st century for these items that are not going to go back into a box. Brent Peterson (07:19.138) Yeah, that's very interesting. And I guess at scale, you need to get a bunch of partners to opt in, right? How have you tackled the scale part to get people in different parts of the country opting into the system? Disney Petit (07:30.784) Yeah, so our service is available across the United States and Canada, and we have over 4,000 nonprofit partners who are currently accepting products from us. The nonprofits, when they register, they tell us the types of products that they're interested in receiving, and then we use our algorithm to match it. One of those products is mattresses. And so that's how we're able to coordinate the logistics of getting these to the appropriate nonprofit location in a quick and efficient manner. And it's been great. so far in the past few months, being able to really see the value in moving these products that are not something that nonprofits typically get in a new or like new condition in these, in these quantities. And so it's been awesome to see those going to people who need them versus ending up in the landfill or through, at a, at a resale location that, you know, is still charging people maybe a little bit more than they can afford for a quality night's sleep. Brent Peterson (08:31.278) What other large products do you see as an opportunity for donations? Disney Petit (08:36.959) So we've been working with a lot of furniture, so couches, cabinets, chairs, desks, tables, things like that. Because once again, the bigger and more bulky a product gets, the less likely it is to be shippable, which means the less likely it is to be cost effective to accept it as a return or to even process it as a return. large behemoth retailers have made it so that customers expect fast free returns. And so those fast free returns are costing these companies a lot of money when they are trying to process a return for one of these bulky items. The other bulky product that we do on a regular basis is pallets, which is really what helped us inform building the warehouse direct product that we were speaking about as well. And so the warehouse direct product means that a retailer or brand or a three PL can go online. They log into liquid donate.com. And they're able to upload product by the box, the pallet, or the truckload for us to match and move it to the appropriate nonprofit location for them. We do everything from the initial matching. have an AI photo recognition tool that's able to determine what the product is if they don't know what is in that box in the back of their warehouse. And then coordinate the moving of the product. If it's a box, we can typically ship it. If it's a pallet, or a truckload, we coordinate the brokerage service to make sure that it gets to the appropriate consumer since we know a lot of people don't know how to use brokerage services. And that all just happens instantly on the backend for the customer. The pallets are an interesting challenge that we had to solve on how do we move an individual pallet because how do you keep track of which nonprofits have loading docs, which ones have pallet jacks, are these things important? And sorting through all of that information was critical to making sure that our matching algorithm could meet the needs of our customers. Brent Peterson (10:42.786) So this is really like, I know that there's these outlet places that would just outlet stuff, right? This is like taking it one step further to not send it to a consolidator who then puts it in, you know, like whatever, something like a closeout sale company that gets stuff for nothing or hardly anything. This is like getting something that's a solution that helps people who need it, right? Disney Petit (11:04.203) Mm-hmm. Disney Petit (11:11.667) Exactly. And our goal is to is to not cannibalize a potential full price customer, which is what we believe a lot of the resale market does. There was just a report that came out as well around how the resale and re-commerce market isn't actually doing more for sustainability, but people are actually feeling more comfortable buying secondhand goods and buying new products on top of it. So secondhand products are not the replacement for the original goods that we thought they were. And so that's been an interesting thing to think about is you have pallets and pallets of product that is unsellable for whatever reason. You think it's a good idea to liquidate it because you're going to get some cash back for a product you sold pennies on the dollar most likely. And then that liquidation is going to end up in one of these closeout stores where you could potentially find what would otherwise be a full price customer who's excited to get a deal. or that product could end up in the landfill anyway. It's a really non-transparent end and a sad story for all of those products that end up at a lot of those types of stores. And the name liquid donate was really like born from the idea of challenging the traditional liquidation paradigm where people were taking the pennies on the dollar they could get. in seeing that as value and instead liquid donating it and working with us to get the product donated and recouping value from the product in a much more unique and efficient way. Brent Peterson (12:47.15) What kind of statistics do you have that or do you have statistics kind of bad to show how you're you're helping in the sustainability and how you're helping in the donation front to to kind of offset what what some of the more commercial things are doing. Disney Petit (13:03.957) Yeah, so there's a lot of different numbers that we track and we actually provide impact reporting as like part of our services. Everyone who works here is a sustainability nerd, so we love seeing the numbers on how much we are impacting the environment in a positive way. since, in the last four years, since I started the company, we've been able to successfully donate over 12 million items that otherwise would have ended up in the landfill. And with our software, we're on average able to reduce the transit distance of a physical good by 90%. And for one small retailer last year that equated to 3 million miles that we were able to remove from the transit process based on our matching. It's been incredible. We also took a trip to the Redwoods this year as a team. And so our most recent statistic we pulled was how many redwood trees of product did we divert from ending up in the landfill? And if you keep in mind that one redwood tree is taller than the Statue of Liberty, we diverted two redwoods. So that was exciting thinking about it from that kind of perspective. Brent Peterson (14:18.368) Yeah, that's awesome. So like, what do you have next? Have you thought about? I know one item that that is is hard to do or that grocery stores have is like their fresh fruit or vegetables. Are you looking at that area as well? Disney Petit (14:30.945) Mm-hmm. Disney Petit (14:34.839) Yeah, so we work with grocery stores and different types of stores that sell packaged goods as well today because we're able to donate product like Liquid Death and the canned water and a number of other companies that sell product within these stores. And we love consumer packaged goods. love CPG. CPG product is a specific area where we actually already love to do it and shine a lot. And so on the fresh foods front, we actually refer them to our friends at Replate and a number of other companies that are working on the food issue. For those who didn't have a chance to listen to the first interview that I did with Brent, we were talking a lot about how prior to this, I was the 15th employee at Postmates where I spent about a decade building out last mile delivery logistics as we know it today. And one of the products I built there was called Food Fight. And Food Fight was an app that enabled all the restaurants that we worked with to press a button and have us come pick up their excess food and take it to local shelters in 700 cities around the US. Throughout the course of building that product before we were acquired by Uber, I learned a ton. I met a lot of people who were in the tech and food recovery space. And between people like Replate and Copia and some of the food bank networks, There is a lot of great work being done in the food recovery space that they don't really need us to step in and do anything special there. There's a lot of companies that are covering that ground today. So we're really leaving it to them as experts. Brent Peterson (16:12.014) That's great. What do you have planned for 2026? What do see that you can contribute to sustainability? Disney Petit (16:23.797) Yeah, there's the biggest thing coming up in 2026 that we're excited about is EPR and DPP. I'm not sure how much of that you've covered on the show before, but for EPR, it's for extended producer responsibility, which means that the onus of the end of life for a physical good is now going to be on the producer for the responsible party for the end of life of that physical good. Now I'm really excited about this because The onus has for far too long been on the consumer. And I don't believe that the consumer is the person who has the best access to knowledge or resources on what to do with these goods. It really should be on the producer. And so that legislation is going to be hitting the EU in the summer of 2026. And that's when it goes into effect. And they're also including DPP, a digital product passport requirement. Now, a lot of this stuff is still being worked out. So I'm definitely no expert on the topic at this point, but we're following it very, very closely. But the idea is that eventually any physical good that you buy should have some kind of QR code that you can scan on it that will tell you where the product was made, what materials it was made from, and the entire supply chain of custody of that product up until what you're supposed to do with it when you no longer want it. Now liquid donate fits into that at the end of life because we can get that product donated to somebody who wants that product. So that's one end of life solution that we actually are calling an extension of life before it needs to go to an upcycler or a recycler or a landfill. The EPR and the DPP legislation is just super, super fascinating. I'm really interested and excited about what that could mean on the sustainability front for these goods. And then It's coming to California in 2027. And so I don't know if you feel like the end of the year snuck up on you, but I'm sure we'll feel the same exact way again next year. And we'll be preparing for the law to go into effect here in the state of California. So looking forward to seeing what that means for the future of sustainability for physical goods that are going to exist in our state. Brent Peterson (18:43.028) That's awesome. I think California has always been on the forefront in all of these aspects, right, and helping to make sure that things aren't ever that we're sustainably living. Disney Petit (18:56.181) Yeah, we're at least trying our best, really setting a precedent for what is possible, as well as understanding that here in California, we have a large economy. so pulling out of selling in California is not something that a retailer is really going to be excited about. And so it does force compliance that then trickles throughout the rest of the country. Brent Peterson (19:19.566) Going into we kind of hinted at next year, but what what do you see as sort of trends from the retailer side? Do you see more retailers adopting some of the sustainability, know outside of what California is doing as a state, especially what the EU is doing? The EU is has I think has more more a lot more people than the US does and so those initiatives sometimes bleed into what we're doing. Do you see that happening next year? Disney Petit (19:47.2) The conversations we've been having with retailers have been way, way more sustainability focused in the past six months than they were prior to that. And so I think that even with the tariffs that really changed the game in Q1, Q2 of this year, we're seeing more and more retailers either caring themselves, having employees that care about these problems who are taking on the initiative of making their products and making returns more sustainable, or people are really starting to listen to the fact that Gen Z is only going to buy from companies that are having more sustainable practices. So I think it's a combination of the two. I'm not sure which one leads the pack on that, but I'll take it where I can get it. Brent Peterson (20:35.662) Yeah, and I guess the last question is about tariffs. And I do ask a lot of my entrepreneur guests about how tariffs are affecting them. I had interesting, we went to a running conference and there's a lot of people making trying to make shoes in the US. And I learned that there's 301 tariffs on a shoe. And that it's actually harder now to make it in the US because you get so penalized for raw materials. Disney Petit (20:44.311) Mm-hmm. Disney Petit (20:54.935) Mm-hmm. Brent Peterson (21:03.88) What are you seeing in the remarketing and in the either giving away or just in a sustainability market for terrorists? It has to be helping the kind of recirculating of goods that are already in the country. Disney Petit (21:18.887) That's the way that we've taken the news. So Q1 and Q2 for any software company, any software company that's doing retail technology knows that Q1 and two are the most critical quarters in order to get in front of decision makers to let them know about your product and run a pilot to see if it's the right fit for them. And instead of having that opportunity this year, we spent Q1 and Q2 getting stressed emails from these retailers saying, I need to reschedule. my meeting, I need to figure out where I'm going to be sourcing the product from, what I'm going to have to do to pay on these duties. And it was a real situation for everybody who was involved in that decision-making process. And so in Q3, once the tariff world started to calm down a bit and the products that were purchased had been purchased, things that were being ordered in bulk were already already had been ordered or delivered or in process. Then we started to be able to have these conversations with retailers. And a lot of them are aware that they likely overordered. And so there's going to be a lot more donations coming because of the overordering from the tariff situation. So as a business, we do believe that we will continue to see an influx of product that is being donated in brand new condition because of the overordering that happened. during, I don't know, the tariff changes, I guess we can call it. So it's going to continue to bring things into circulation through donation, but at the same time, I'm sure retailers are going to do what they can to sell these products off at a price that still makes them a decent cut because it's so hard to compete as a small or a medium-sized business, like a retailer right now, against know, behemoths that are out there. Brent Peterson (23:19.18) Yeah, Disney, we have a few minutes left. As I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today? Disney Petit (23:27.891) Yeah, so my shameless plug today is around asking your friends for things that you want that they might have in excess. So as an example, the other day I was on a phone call with one of my teammates on, think I was on air, like headphones from 15 years ago. And she said, Disney, I can't hear you. The headphones just not working. And as a sustainability nerd, I'm thinking about all the products and what it took to make the headphones and how I need to make them last forever. And, you know, simply thinking about how it's really, you really, your teammates really need to be able to hear you on the phone. It's an important thing. And so I went to my group chats and I texted and just said, Hey, like, does anyone have an extra pair of headphones that they have been meaning to donate or get rid of or something. And of course, you know, they all reply and they're like, yes, of course we have things. living our values and going out there and asking your friends for things they might have extras of is my shameless plug. I think we should all be leaning on each other because when I went and retrieved them from these folks, one pair for myself and then the other seven pair to donate. they were so excited to get them off off their hands. So I think it really did everyone a favor. Brent Peterson (24:56.982) Yeah, I think the technology, I have so much stuff that that's either hard to sell on Facebook Marketplace or whatever you want to do with it. That's such a great initiative and just a great thing that you can do as an individual because somebody does appreciate that when you say you have it and they get it. Anyways, that's great. really appreciate that. Disney has been such a great conversation. I'm so happy to have you on again. Disney Petit (25:20.353) Yeah. Brent Peterson (25:27.064) Disney Petit is the founder of Liquid Donate. Thank you so much for being here. Disney Petit (25:31.5) Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure.