Welcome to Retail Checks and Balances, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the bustling world of commerce and culinary delights to help you grow your business and win. Join us as we explore the fascinating stories, trends, and challenges that shape the retail and hospitality industry, from cozy corner cafes to sprawling shopping malls and everything in between. And now, here's your host, Kevin Spencer.

Welcome again. Today, we have a very special and exciting guest, Melodie van der Baan CEO of Max Retail, who's focused on that cunning thing that everybody thinks about that inventories are just stuck that you want to get rid of. Welcome to the show, Melodie and I'm happy and excited for you to join us as a guest today.

Kevin Spencer

Thank you, Kevin.

Melodie van der Baan 

I guess we can jump right in. Give us some insights in terms of what's your background and what do you do?

Kevin Spencer

Sure. So my background is as an independent retailer of nine years and a distributor for five years before that. So my entire life has been surrounded by inventory. And today I am the founder and CEO at Max Retail, which enables independent retailers to sell their excess inventory online with fees.

Oh, fantastic. So you're saying that they can just give you the inventory and you'll get rid of it for them, right?

Well, you know, there's over two million retailers across North America and Europe with this problem. And as much as I would love to take it into my possession, it actually is. It's one step better than that. Our retailers are able to keep this inventory in their stores while listing it on Max Retail. And we go ahead and distribute it across a variety of e-commerce sites and resale marketplaces. And we send them orders and they ship it out. But the nice thing about it is that way, if they have a customer who comes in store who actually wants an item, they can still sell it to a customer in store or through us.

Oh, that's great. I mean, I was just joking about taking the inventory.

I mean, listen, wouldn't we all love for, you know, for us to just blink our eyes like a, like a little genie and make the excess inventory disappear. And sometimes, sometimes that works out, but unfortunately, most of the time when it just disappears altogether like that, it's because it's being donated or liquidated. And neither of those two things help a retailer's profitability, which is why we had to be a little more creative.

So you believe that you can access different demographics to get rid of that stuck inventory, correct?

Exactly. Absolutely. It's hard for a local retailer who only has so many people walking in the store every day, where there's hundreds of millions of people shopping online at every second.

Fantastic. I'm not giving too much of your secrets, but tell me exactly how these expertise you have can help customers, even my customers, of course.

Yeah. Well, you know, I have to say, God bless every grocery retailer out there because grocery is a hard market with low margin and high turn. And yet every single person on the planet needs to eat, right? Correct. And so, you know, it's a very important retail business. But I will say at Max Retail, we specialize in soft goods. We specialize in in apparel, in footwear, and people say, well, what kind of inventory can you sell on Max Retail? I joke, if you've heard of it, we can sell it. If it's a brand name that you're familiar with, or if you can identify it, Max Retail can likely help turn your excess inventory back into your wholesale cost.

No, but even, I mean, you hit the nail on the head in terms of some of the retailers now, even in the supermarket aspect, are selling apparel, are selling things that are not traditionally groceries. So I think this is beneficial for people to understand that, you know, it's all about diversification. Don't you agree?

Yes. And I will say we're doing more these days in home and in beauty than ever before. So that's been really an interesting market for me to see that we're selling face creams and eyeliners and scent diffusers, right? That's not where we started, but when you're working with independent retailers nationwide, they're listing a variety of items. And so we very naturally fall into new categories and find that they're able to be sold.

I'm not a song to sexist, but I know most of my, um, some of my bigger customers really do focus on health and beauty. I mean, it's, uh, you know, even sometimes my wife, you know, we go to the pharmacy and she has to make a stop there just because it's there, right? And it looks beautiful and they have those nice showcases to impulse those that buy, right?

That's why I can't walk into Ulta. I'm a goner.

You're right, there's even a nice, I don't remember the name of the store, but when we're driving home sometimes, she said, can we stop here? And I said, okay, no problem. But tell me a little about, you know, what challenges and what lessons you've learned or even people you've worked with in terms of managing this inventory aspect. Yeah, you know, I think it's been,

Some of the harder lessons I've learned recently is, and I think this is really true in life in general, you get out of anything what you put in, right? And what we see on max retail is a subset of customers that are making 10 $20,000 a month. a month from us. And that's meaningful. That is paying rent, their payroll, they're writing themselves bigger checks, they're hiring more employees, they're opening new locations with the money that MaxRetail is giving them. And I think one of the lessons that I've learned is Gee, there can be another retailer in another area with the exact same merchandise, the exact same store size, exact same employee count, but they're not as committed to max retail as say this other retailer, right? And so they're not making as much. Right. And that's been a hard lesson for me to learn because I want everyone to make that much. But at the end of the day, you still got to list inventory if you want us to sell it. You still have to approve orders to get access to our top premium channels. Right. So there is a there is a relationship between a platform and a user. and a way to make the most out of anything. You think about anything you use, right? You get out of QuickBooks, however much you know how to use QuickBooks, right? And they're always launching new features, but if you don't learn how to use them, you can't benefit the most from it. So I would say that's been a really important lesson we've learned lately. And we're always trying to work on how can we do a better job educating our customers? How can we help them understand how to make more money? But yeah, at the end of the day, we're all a bunch of users, right? And I don't know about you, but I'm terrible at reading directions. So I'm always trying to make things even easier for our users.

No, you're right. I mean, we all do that. You know, we try to do it ourselves first and then if we can't figure it out, then we go to the directions. But I mean, that's interesting. I mean, I think you're driving the success stories based on the lessons learned. And that's that's fundamental from just listening to the passion that you have in terms of what your company represents. Which brings me to my next questions. You know what? Is there any particular project that you're working on now that's going to evolutionarize the role of retail or, you know, as your company itself is driving that additional revenue for customers?

Yeah, I couldn't be more excited about 2025. When we look at excess inventory, it comes from somewhere. right? And now, let's be honest, it could come from something as bad as the weather is too warm, right? So people don't want to buy hot coffee, right? Or it could be that the winter is too warm, so they don't buy boots. So whether you're selling grocery, or whether you're selling shoes, you know, the weather can still throw you for a loop. But really, there's a lot of other things we can do in terms of our buying and our planning. right, and really evaluating our assortment. And so one of the things that I'm most excited about for Max Retail over the next year is being able to help our customers understand the inventory that is at risk. If you think about, you buy a size run of shoes or dresses, whatever the case may be, and after 30 days, you only have a 10% sell through. Well, I got news for you. The odds of you selling the other 90% in the next 30 days are real slim. So when you're an independent retailer, you're very busy running your store. You are an octopus and you have to do everything. And oftentimes we don't realize that we're sitting on that size run of flip-flops until it's October and the weather is changing. And so at Max Retail, We hear the number one thing from our customers is, I don't have any time and what should I list? And so we are building a recommendations engine that can analyze your inventory, help you understand what's at risk so that you can list it sooner in your product lifecycle and sell through more of it faster. Because to be honest, I can help someone sell flip-flops a lot faster in September than I can in November. I can still sell them in November, but not as fast. So we're really excited about moving upward and upstream to solving the problem of excess inventory through being more proactive. And then in 2026, we'd like to help them out with understanding what they should be buying based on what didn't or did do well in the future.

You took the next question out of my mouth because I was about to ask, I think it's great if you'd get in front of when they're actually making those purchase decisions. It's a good purchase decision based on those particular variables of weather or buying habits or season or whatever the case is. So you took that question out of my mouth, but that's fantastic that there's a vision and for your business in terms of the next two years where you want things to go. Is there a particular mechanism that you use in terms of how you approach your customers? How do you get them to sign up with MaxRe?

I would say 40% of our new sellers come from existing sellers today. The word of mouth is our strongest means of acquiring new customers. Outside of that, building our brand has been a priority, helping retailers understand, hey, we're not going away, we're not going anywhere. We've been here for the last four years, and we're just getting started. I would say, in the future, we see customers coming to us through anything from their point of sale, right? If you think about a point of sale, they're not making money on transactions that aren't happening. Unsold inventory is the transaction that never happened. And so we get excited about helping move more volume through these point of sales. And so, you know, for us to help their customers extend their life, for us to help their customers increase their profitability and their turns, It's a great symbiotic relationship there with things like Point of Sale and e-commerce partners. And then also, we do expect that the retailers will still continue to be our single greatest driver of new customers.

Okay, let's get a little more detail in terms of what you just said. So basically a customer has, let's say they look at a report, they have overstock on these items in these departments and they wanna come to you and say, right, I need you to analyze this based on your mechanisms. I'd let you take it from there in terms of what do you do to help that customer get rid of that inventory, that overstock inventory.

Sure. So retailers can list via point of sale integration, or if they don't have an integration that we work with, they can send us an on-hand report of their aged inventory. We have an entire team. dedicated to enhancing the data. So when we receive an on-hand report from a retailer, let's say there's just going to be brand, style, number, color, quantity, and wholesale cost, and also MSRP. We are going to, through a mix of AI and web scraping, pull all the other attributes needed to sell that product online. You need country of origin, you need composition, you need wash care, right? You need all these details, even fit, rise, inseam, depending on the item. And that's what it takes to be able to even expose a product on a major marketplace online today. And so our company does this cleansing process and then distributes product feeds of inventory to e-commerce sites and resale marketplaces where there's end consumer demand for that product. And then when Susie in Hohokus, New Jersey is buying something online on a Monday night, she has no idea. But that order went through Max Retail and our seller in Dallas, Texas got a notification that says, great news, those jeans sold. They get a prepaid label right then and there. They put it in a box. And as soon as that label is scanned, the money drops into their bank account for their wholesale cost minus our 15% fee. And that's how easy it is.

Wow, that's really pretty easy. So you're saying even before when the item is purchased, even before the inventory leaves, wherever it is, that customer gets paid within what, the next day or two?

Yeah, as soon as that label is scanned by USPS. That's right. Faster you ship, faster you get paid.

Do you do this internationally or just US?

Today we're in the United States. And so we sell, we do sell internationally. We sell to, you know, e-commerce sites in China, Canada, Latin America, and the United States. The Caribbean, well, Puerto Rico, but outside of Puerto Rico, not yet.

Okay. So then there's room for growth for sure. Nice. So you spoke about the buzzword that everybody talks about these days, AI, right? Yeah. And one of the things I like to ask people when they talk about AI is how is that engine managed in the sense of how do you get that data into your AI? Is it based on something that you build? Is it taking something from a third party? I don't want you to give me your secrets, but at least if you can guide me along the lines of, you know, how that happens.

Yeah. Well, as my team tells me, it is rapidly evolving every single day. And so our team is privy on the most cutting edge technology coming out of the best universities of the world. And so I would say the way that our AI is built is kind of like a soup, taking the best things coming from the most incredible, brilliant minds around the world, making it available, and combining it into something fierce, and able to be leveraged for our industry. So I would say that, you know, obviously, that with machine learning, it's constantly training on our data. But there's a lot of incredible, incredible code being written and utilized that is kind of being put together from a lot of different places to come together for a purpose.

Oh, fabulous. I mean, I like how you put that together. So, so sound. Which brings me to my next question, you know, if based on just listening to you, I see the passion, you love what you do, which is important in any business. If you love what you do, then it's going to succeed beyond bounds. What advice would you give to anybody who wants to get involved in your type of business or even, you know, run in their own business?

Well, I think the secret to taking risk, which someone explained to me that I take risks. I never thought of this as risk. But someone, when they pointed out to me, Mel, you know, you're quite a risk taker. I said, I've just never seen it that way. I've always had absolute certainty in what I'm doing and my why. If your why is strong enough, you can get past anything. And so for me, it was seeing unsold inventory for 15 years. And when I said, gee, I've just got to try to solve this problem, the first thing I did was I called up all the retailers that I used to sell to when I was a rep. And I said, hey, you remember when I used to help you move inventory between one another and that was helping you out? I said, what have you been doing since then? How have you been getting rid of your sale rack and the unsold inventory? And they said, I don't have anything. Nothing's been helping me. And so from 2009, when I first saw this problem, To 2016 when I said, gee, I'm still thinking about this problem. Nothing had changed in those seven years. And even from then, while I still owned my store and had my children and went through a pandemic. and worked on this still and worked on this still. And even when I wasn't sure how I was going to solve this problem, I always had certainty of it, right? Because the problem wasn't going away. So my advice to anyone would be find a problem that isn't going away that is going to drive you nuts. And you will have the passion and the endurance to solve it. And I think the second advice I would give is you really have to love it that much. You have to love solving this problem more than you love a nice fancy house, more than you love a nice fancy car, more than you love fancy shoes and watches, because it is going to be a cost, a cost to you, a sacrifice. of you, a sacrifice of your family. But if you love your problem so much and the people you solve for, it is worth it. I have such a fulfilled life because I have a purpose and you can't put a price tag on purpose.

Well said. Wow. You made my paws raise in terms of listening to that. Um, What, let's, let's skip a beat and let's talk about you. What, what are your personal interests and hobbies? And, you know, tell us about your family.

So I have a wonderful husband and two children, five-year-old and a seven-year-old. Uh, let's see, my name is Melody. I love to sing. I'm not very good at it, but that doesn't stop me. So something fun is karaoke is a big part of Max Retail's company culture. If we're getting together for an offsite, there will be karaoke. I love that. I love art. This art behind me is made by my daughter, made by my husband. And yeah, I'm big in my faith, right? I have a really amazing God who enables me to live out this purpose. And, uh, you know, fun fact, I like to crochet, which is kind of nerdy, but fun.

My mom crochets actually. There we go. I didn't think I'd ever, I've never met anybody else who's done it. We always see it and say, Oh, we bought that from somebody, but that's great. She has a lot of patience and she's, she's even done like a tablecloth out of just starting from scratch. And it's amazing. You know, she joined everything together.

I love it.

So nice. Um, what do you hope your legacy will be?

Oh, my legacy is well on its way. And I say that because my legacy is those who I mentor.

Nice.

So before I had children, I always had young girls working for me at my boutique and instilling in them anything I knew or had learned, so they could shortcut to their future and not make some of the mistakes that I made. That's important to me, that they understand that, you know, another core principle at Max Retail is we lift while we climb. you must always pull someone up as you are elevating. And so teaching that to all the girls that I've mentored over the years and watching them apply it, hearing them say things to others that I've taught them, that is a legacy. It's kind of like a drop of water, right? A drop of water doesn't look like a lot, but it creates a ripple that goes outward. And I'm already seeing this beautiful ripple effect from girls that I've been mentoring for 10 years. who are the age now that I was when I started mentoring them. And they're like, whoa, this is weird, Mel. And then I have, you know, uh, some, some young people in our office today. And every time I learn something new and I have an aha moment, the first thing I want to do is run out and teach someone else. Cause I want them to have it that much faster than I received it. So they can go further than me.

Wow, good stuff. Another question, I think it's going along the lines of what you just said, how do you measure success in your business and what has been your biggest success for your business or for you personally?

So I would say I'm a very tough critic, all right? So I'm very proud of the impact we have on our independent retailer community. I am proud to say that we pay out an average of over $26,000 a year to independent retailers on the high side. Some are making a quarter of a million, but on the average 20, 26,000, it's not a small amount that feels really good. Uh, I would say I'm also very proud of the, The leadership team I've built at Max Retail, their sincere passion matches mine.

Which is important.

It's fabulous. Our investors care about our customers as much as I do. And that's rare. So I would say my accomplishments have been finding the right people around the table to enable my vision to become a reality. Everything from the customers, to the investors, to the leaders, to the contributors, right? Like that feels really good.

That's really uplifting and motivational, I must say, because, you know, a lot of people measure success based on money. But, you know, when you take it like that, it's more along the lines of what your legacy would be. And then, you know, everything else takes care of itself. Of course, we want to make money.

That's right. Kevin, money comes when you do the right things and you work your ass off.

Of course.

You don't have to worry about money. You focus on planting seeds. The harvest takes care of itself. Money is a lagging indicator. Okay? The leading indicator is the satisfaction of your customers. If they are satisfied, if they are seeing value, you will make money.

For sure. Well, thank you so much. I don't know if you have anything else you would like to add or talk about at this point in time.

I would just like to apologize to anyone who this passion was just too much for.

You don't have to apologize for your passion.

I don't have a button where the levels go up and down. It's on like this all the time. But I'm glad to be here. And I'm so glad to talk to you. And I'm excited for your retail community to keep growing. I would say, just look outward, right? Think of the world five years from now. And think of how your business is fitting in it. And start charting that path now. Don't wait for five years to creep up on you. Chart it. plan it, be where you want to be during that time when the world is a different place.

Perfect. And one of the innovative things that we do as an organization outside of this podcast is we bring that new innovative technology in terms of one of our VIP events that we have every year. And I would love for you to come and speak about what you guys do and how you can uplift the engagement that we have with our customers. So I will definitely be in touch.

Awesome, awesome. Thank you for having me.

Last thing, if you want to tell us how we can get in contact with you, I mean, this would be in the show notes, more or less, website, Instagram, whatever.

maxretail.com is our site. You can learn more about us there. And on Instagram, it's join max retail.

Okay. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this has been great. This is probably one of the best sessions I've had. Not saying the others weren't good, but this is great. I love your passion and, you know, we'll be in touch. Thank you so much. Awesome.

All right. Take care.

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