For online retailers, there is so much gnashing of teeth over the volume and expense of free returns, which The Atlantic called “the intractable problem of online shopping,” that it’s easy to forget that e-commerce might not have taken off without them.

As online shopping was first beginning to get its footing in the 1990s, the notion of buying shoes or clothing without first trying them on or seeing what the color looked like in person seemed far-fetched to many. Therefore, the practice of not charging consumers to return items was meant to compensate for turning their homes into fitting rooms.

“We needed to replicate that same kind of convenience online so we had to offer free returns,” Ricky Choi, CEO and co-founder of Outerspace, a third-party logistics company that focuses on e-commerce, told Retail Brew.

However, from the onset, the expense for retailers to offer free returns was a challenge, and as the volume has increased over the decades, it’s only gotten worse.

David Sobie, CEO and co-founder of Happy Returns, the company that pioneered box-free and label-free returns in 2016 and which was purchased by UPS late last year, has witnessed reverse logistics getting more and more challenging.

Returns are “the low-grade headache that’s now become a migraine,” Sobie told Retail Brew.

Keep reading here.—AAN

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Cannabis retailers had a banner day on the industry’s answer to Black Friday, 4/20.

Headset, a cannabis data analytics company, found that 4/20 sales were up in the 20 states it tracked.

• Oregon retailers had the most YoY growth, up 189%, “just ahead of Florida’s 185%.”
• Even states at the bottom of Headset’s list still had dramatic growth, namely Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, all of whose April 20 revenues were up ~70%.

Keep reading here.—AAN

The old, cabana-like facade of a Hollister store is as familiar to the American mall-goer as the scent of Auntie Anne’s pretzels. So when people started noticing some of those storefronts being converted into sock stores, haunted houses, escape rooms, and axe-throwing venues in recent years, they might have assumed the retail chain was still struggling after its 2000s heyday.

Since last July, however, Hollister’s in-store traffic and revenue are up, thanks in part to a rebranding effort and a TikTok campaign to support it that began around nine months ago. The campaign is part of a partnership with IF7, the same Gen Z consultancy that worked with Hollister’s parent company Abercrombie & Fitch on its TikTok strategy aimed at a more millennial audience, which played a role in the brand’s resurgence.

Keep reading here on Marketing Brew.—KH

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