A former pro baseball player is trying to make online returns easier on retailers — and the planet

• Spencer Kieboom, a former pro baseball player, is a cofounder and the CEO of Pollen Returns.
• The company helps online retailers recover their goods sooner to speed up the returns process.
• This can reduce the amount of inventory companies need, which is better for the planet.
• This article is part of Insider's weekly newsletter on sustainability. Sign up here.

Spencer Kieboom likes solving problems more than anything else. 

He is a cofounder and the CEO of Pollen Returns, a logistics startup that helps retailers take back the things we order online and then decide we no longer want.

Kieboom, who was a catcher with the Washington Nationals from 2016 until 2019, told Insider that after he retired from the MLB, he began wondering why companies handled their returns the way they did. What he found was a mess.

He said many companies had more than 20% of their inventory caught up in the returns process. That's not good for business — or the planet — because it can force companies to overproduce goods so they have enough on hand. And returns that show up at a warehouse late might miss an often narrow window for being sold again.

"It's been left to a policy, and a policy is not a solution. The policy is a Band-Aid," Kieboom said. 

Up to 9.5 billion pounds of returns in the US wound up in landfills last year. It's the equivalent to 10,500 fully loaded Boeing 747s, Insider previously reported. 

Kieboom's drive to use information for solving problems — he said he'd always sought more data to improve his game — led him to question how he might make it more efficient for e-commerce companies to recover customers' cast-offs. 

"It just so happens that I chose the underbelly of retail, which is returns, which feels a lot like being a backup catcher," Kieboom, who's 32, said.

It's quite the sizable underbelly: The National Retail Federation estimated that consumers returned about 16.5% of online orders last year. The trade group said that in 2022, that percentage was in line with the share of goods customers took back to brick-and-mortar stores. During the depths of the pandemic, return rates were higher for online orders because so many of us were shopping from home.

Pollen Returns, based in Atlanta, works with businesses around the US by dispatching a driver for a ride-hailing service who can pick up all the returns within a few blocks of each other that are going to a particular retailer. The driver then takes those returns, even if they're not in a box, to a shipping center so a batch can go back all at once. That can reduce the volume of cardboard that gets used in the return process. And grouping items to be returned in a bundle is more efficient.

This approach, Kieboom said, helps reduce the carbon footprint of shipping and gets returns back to retailers faster so companies know where their inventory is and how much more they need to create.

Making the returns process more efficient can help retailers plan better, Kieboom said. Under the existing setup, a customer starts a return, but the retailer often doesn't know when — or even whether — that package will make it back. 

"If I don't know when something's coming, how can I plan and predict my actual inventory needs? I can't," he said. "So I have to manufacture and I have to produce more."