Her Startup Was 'Not the Sexiest Silicon Valley Situation.' Then She Identified a Universal Problem, and Revenue Grew 10x In a Year. Allison Lee didn't plan to start a sustainability-driven business. But she started (Re)vive when she heard retail customers talking about their biggest problem: returns. "They were like, 'I need to fix this, like, yesterday.'"

Allison Lee's first company, Hemster, was a tailoring service, and in the early rounds of fundraising, she got a lot of blank looks from dudes in hoodies in jeans. Nonetheless, Hemster grew into a successful company with customers like Reformation and Outdoor Voices, who could offer tailoring to their customers in store, while collecting data in the process.

Prior to this, Lee had worked in data segmentation and monetization in Silicon Valley, so Hemster was the product of her professional experience, and the observation that Americans tailored goods far less than people did in South Korea, where she grew up before moving to America as a teenager.

But after founding Hemster, a series of twists and turns — most notably during COVID lockdowns, when in store shopping was temporarily on pause — led Lee to realize that tailoring could provide the most value to retailers looking to restore returns and other damaged goods.

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In 2023 Hemster began repairing and rerouting brands's returned or damaged inventory, and in 2024, the company rebranded as (Re)vive with this as the company's central offering. Since the switch, the company's revenue and units processed have grown by over 10x and they've achieved B Corp certification. All of this made Lee a finalist on our Entrepreneur of 2024 list of 20 innovative leaders.

You've talked about being labeled an underdog earlier in your career. What role has that played for you in your founder journey?

I moved to the United States when I was 13, so I was always an outsider. I didn't really understand the cultural norms, I didn't really speak the language. I think that that actually allows you to set your own rules because you have this fresh set of eyes, and you're like, "because I don't know what the cultural norms are, I'm just going to try to develop my own and see and test it out in this market."

Because I wasn't from here I think a lot of the investors — especially when I was going out and raising against Hemster — they were like, "you're trying to do a tailoring business?" which is not the sexiest Silicon Valley situation. A lot of the times I was pitching these very old school tech guys and they were like, "I only wear hoodies and jeans and I've never gotten anything tailored in my life." How do you convince someone like that that there's a world outside of their bubble? I think I got exposed to that for that round, but it was much easier when I did this round recently for (Re)vive. I'm glad I went through that boot camp of coming in as an outsider and having to convince people to see it the way that I see it.

You've embraced a lot of change from the beginning of Hemster to now, with the switch to (Re)vive. How have you navigated those changes?

It was such a roller coaster ride for almost eight years. My career started in Silicon Valley, on the data monetization side. I didn't know anything about retail and fashion, but I always wanted to be a little bit closer to the consumer side. Our very first hypothesis with Hemster was deploying technology into brick and mortar and fitting rooms so that they can offer free alterations and customizations and use that to acquire customer data, but also at the same time they're maximizing sales and minimizing returns, because everything you alter basically becomes final sale. It's been a very interesting journey, for sure, because we certainly didn't start out thinking about sustainability as a company. I really just wanted to help the consumers with their problems, but I think it sort of led us to find this different area that brands seem to need a lot more help on, so we pivoted throughout the journey.

(Re)vive was created from the realization that your customers had a lot of damaged inventory. How do you stay open to problems that customers have, even if they're not already in your business plan?

I saw that damaged products were a more universal problem for every brand that we worked on. When we were pitching the tailoring Hemster solutions to brands, it felt like it was a "nice to have." They were like, "maybe I'll slot it in, if we have room in our roadmap." But when I talked to brands about this inventory problem, it felt like something that they were like, "I need to fix this, like, yesterday." When you feel this shift in urgency, you're forced to almost reexamine the hypotheses that you were married to.

Related: What Is Sustainable Entrepreneurship, and Why Does it Matter?

In the past year, (Re)vive's revenue has grown 10x. How do you ensure that you can sustain that growth within the company?

We basically discovered this market in 2021 and 2022 and a lot of the brands did their first pilots last year and signed evergreen agreements last year, but they all started January 1 of this year. We had multiple contracts all starting at the same time, so we did our best to scale operationally as quickly as possible, but until we saw the volumes come in, honestly, it didn't feel real for me or my team.

The only reason why I think we were able to scale up in this way was because we started to operate more as a 4PL model, which means we don't own and operate our warehouses, but rather we're outsourcing it to our vendors. So it was much faster for us to find established vendors who could take like, 100,000 units from us on a monthly basis and train them to use our technology than to hire more people and set up our own warehouses. I think we were processing maybe like 2000 units by the end of last year, and then June this year we did like 65,000 units, so it was just crazy growth. Now we are preparing for next year where we're doing like another 5x growth on that.

One of (Re)vive's major 2024 milestones was achieving B Corp certification. What was that process like?

Before we chose to [pursue B Corp certification,] I could tell that we were bringing real impact to brands. If things were going to be landfilled, and we were bringing them back into circulation, how do you measure the impact? Once we started to talk to brands, they actually didn't have a way to quantify other than financially. So we were showing a lot on the ROI, but I felt like that was just a part of the equation. What about the emissions and water saved that brands themselves didn't actually have a way to track?

When we met with the B Lab Team, [they asked about tracking] how much emissions our 3PL partners [and internal teams used]. We didn't have that information, so it was very much from the ground up [after that.] We learned a lot, including that one of the 3PL vendors that we were using before weren't the most humane in their dealings with their employees, so we had to fire them. So it also forced us to hold ourselves more accountable, because if you want to bring positive results, but do it in a humane and socially responsible way, I think it just needs to be audited by somebody else that's not your own internal team.