Unfreeze $500 Billion in Stuck Inventory

01 /The Concept

Max Retail helps retailers turn dead inventory into cash.

It does this by connecting sellers with off-price retailers and specialty resellers – both online and offline, domestic and international – who know which customers will pay full price for what the original seller couldn't move. For most retailers, this is far more attractive than running a 75%-off clearance sale:

- A deep discount sale recovers maybe 25 cents on the dollar. - It also trains customers to wait for sales, eroding full-price demand over time.

Max Retail supports fashion, footwear, bags, accessories, jewelry, and frames.

To get started, sellers register, pass a verification check, connect to the platform, and begin uploading their surplus inventory. Max Retail doesn't buy anything itself – it runs a private, invitation-only marketplace where verified retailers and distributors can buy and sell each other's excess stock. A single unit or a batch of thousands both qualify.

Typical sale prices run around 90% of the seller's original wholesale cost, with Max Retail taking a commission from that. So sellers do take a loss – but a smaller one than they'd absorb on a markdown sale. That calculus is clearly working: the platform already has 2,000 members.

Max Retail was [covered here](/review/srazu-stat-globalnym) at the end of 2022 when it raised $5.9 million. It has now closed a $15 million round.

02 /Why It Matters

Unsold inventory is frozen capital. And the scale of the problem is staggering: roughly $500 billion in merchandise is sitting in retail warehouses at any given moment.

The sell-through data shows why. In apparel, only 24% of stock sells in the first two months after it arrives at a warehouse. By six months, that's up to 45%. By a year, 69%. Cosmetics are even worse – only 48% sells within a year.

That frozen capital pressure is exactly why retailers are motivated to find smarter disposal channels. The ideal solution is one that recovers more money, causes less operational hassle, and doesn't teach customers to expect discounts.

Closed B2B marketplaces are one answer. Ghost, [covered here](/review/tvoi-dengi-lezhat-u-nih-na-sklade) in 2023, operates on the same model but restricts sales to wholesale lots only – targeting larger sellers and moving bigger volume. That focus has helped it raise $68 million.

Max Retail targets the other 98.6% of retailers – the small ones. Its benchmark case study: the average customer earns $1,100 per month selling surplus through the marketplace. With 2,000 members after two years of active operation, the question is whether that audience will scale fast enough to compensate for small average deal sizes. The 98.6% of the retail market that qualifies is a massive TAM – but 2,000 participants is a thin start.

Closed marketplaces aren't the only path. Yaysay, [covered here](/review/500-milliardov-dollarov-za-30-minut), takes a consumer-facing angle: a TikTok-style feed where an AI curates surplus items to individual tastes. A key hook: each item is shown to each user only once, and there's a 30-minute purchase window before it disappears. The scarcity mechanic drives conversions. Investors found it convincing enough to back it with $10.3 million.

And then there's prevention rather than cure. Syrup, [covered here](/review/ogromnyj-rynok-bolshaja-problema-no-reshenie-est), built AI-driven inventory forecasting specifically for apparel – predicting future sales down to color and size. It has raised $25.1 million.

For sellers who want to avoid deep discounts without disposing of inventory externally, there's still another option: swap discounts for charitable donations. The evidence suggests a smaller donation can outperform a larger discount in driving purchase decisions. Givz ([covered here](/review/chto-deshevle-skidok)) raised $3 million on this thesis; ChangeUp raised $6.5 million.

03 /Opportunities

The $500 billion buried in retail warehouses is the general opportunity. The question is how to dig it out.

Building a private marketplace like Max Retail or Ghost is the most direct approach. The demand side – sellers with surplus – isn't the hard part. The harder problem is finding reliable buyers who will absorb that inventory at scale and on a recurring basis.

One angle worth thinking through: the talent shortage in developed markets has pushed companies to source from developing markets – skills that are abundant there and scarce here. A similar logic could apply to surplus inventory. Developed-market surplus flows to developing markets where supply of that category is constrained. Simultaneously, fashion from designers in developing markets could flow the other direction – to buyers in developed markets who are looking for something fresh and non-commoditized. The Folklore built exactly that second direction: a B2B marketplace connecting retailers in developed markets with designers from Africa and Southeast Asia, raising $6.2 million.

Either direction is interesting. Both are essentially arbitrage plays on inventory and taste across markets. The key insight either way: the MVP has to be built for global flow from day one. Testing this inside a single domestic market misses the whole point.