What if returns are hiding 4–5 points of EBITDA in plain sight?

In this episode of the Resilient Supply Chain Podcast, I’m joined by Terry Boyle, CEO of Trove, to explore one of retail and logistics’ most neglected pressure points: reverse logistics. Terry’s argument is blunt and useful: if brands care about supply chain resilience, sustainability, risk, data, and visibility, they can’t keep treating returns as the untidy corner nobody wants to inspect.

You’ll hear how online returns are reshaping inventory economics, why imperfect product too often gets parked on pallets until value evaporates, and how better returns processing can unlock labour savings, faster return-to-stock, stronger resale pricing, and fraud reduction. Not glamorous. Very profitable.

We also break down why customer-reported returns data is often unreliable, how item-level visibility can feed back into design, sizing, packaging, supplier decisions, and quality control, and why sustainability may scale faster when it is sold as better inventory economics rather than moral virtue alone.

Interestingly Terry also shares the very real problem of “boxes of rocks” showing up in returns, because apparently even fraud has a logistics department now.

🎙️ Listen now to hear how Terry Boyle and Trove are rethinking returns, resale, and the hidden economics of resilient, sustainable supply chains.

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