File this one under brilliant ideas that come from homeless people. Monika Wiela was a rising marketing executive in Poland (she introduced the KitKat bar to the Poles) but decided to try the American Dream and moved to Chicago in 2006. She started her own business exporting shoes back to Poland and in 2012 opened a Web retailer called StyleUpGirl.com, specializing in affordable but racy footwear.
Most days she walks to work on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, a busy thoroughfare that tends to have a lot of panhandling vagrants. One day Wiela walked by a homeless man holding up a sign that read, “I Need Shoes.” What a shame, she thought, since she had a lot of shoes in her warehouse, but a homeless guy doesn’t need $70 knee-high gladiator boots. But what about all those boxes the shoes go out in? She spent the whole night thinking about what she could do with those boxes, and what the online retail industry could do with all of its boxes.
This is a big problem. Amazon ships more than 4 million boxes a day. The industry overall in the U.S. ships about 26 million boxes per day, some 40% of which are from business to consumer. Most of them go straight to the landfill. What if she could convince online retailers to provide pre-paid addressed mailing labels in every box that goes out so that shoppers can stuff the empty boxes with donated clothes and shoes and re-ship them to charities? It's like Tom's Shoes meets Goodwill meets reverse logistics. Why didn't anyone think of this before?
Thus was born GiveBackBox. Wiela spent a year developing the idea, using Styleupgirl as the guinea pig. The site saw a return rate of 13% when proactively marketing the initiative to its customers. GiveBackBox ran some tests with electronics retailers Newegg, which without any real marketing effort saw a return rate of around 0.5%. “This makes us believe that the effective return rate will be around 7-8% by the end of the year with active participation from online retailers,” says Wiela, who is launching full-scale with NewEgg shortly.
"At Newegg we are always looking for innovative ways to support our customers and community, whether that means offering new products and services, exceptional values, or worthwhile programs like GiveBackBox," says Soren Mills, chief marketing officer for Newegg. "When we first saw GiveBackBox last year, we knew it was a cause our customers would rally behind. It helps us develop sustainable business practices, while giving our customers an easy way to give back to the community."
She has talked to Amazon and the big players but their volumes are too big to handle right now. It’s one step at a time. Wiela also wants to get involved with non-retail shipments such as person-to-person FedEx boxes or moving boxes from U-Haul, an organization she's already spoken with. You don’t need to wait to start recycling your incoming boxes. GiveBackBox lets you download a prepaid generic label you can affix to any box, and it’s already addressed to Goodwill in Indianapolis.
