Building a Reverse Logistics and Recommerce Operating System

Operations and Supply Chain

Reverse Logistics at Scale: A Salvage-to-Sale Operating System

One World LLC (dba Instrooments) · 2015 to Present

Context

Salvage consumer electronics arrive ungraded, untested, and unpredictable. For eleven years I have run a family operation that buys this inventory through the liquidation channels of national retailers, including Best Buy, Walmart, Sam’s Club, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Macy’s, and B&H Photo, and turns it back into sellable product at 10,000 to 15,000 units a year.

Decision

Treat it as a production line, not a reselling desk. Every unit moves through the same measured lifecycle, and the line runs on systems built for it: a customized ClickUp workflow for operations and a custom barcoding and labeling system integrated into openboxcentral.com.

Execution

85 to 90% continues to resale; the balance routes to electronics recycling.

A three-person family team works on site; two long-term remote team members in Ukraine handle listings and administration, staffed on the time offset so work queued at the end of a US day is done by the next morning.

On the cost side, I aggregated carrier and supply agreements through group purchasing to hold per-unit outbound cost down, and put a Veeqo pilot in front of the inventory and shipping layer with a defined rollout gate rather than a full cutover.

The build phase ran as Scrum while the work was construction. Once the build phase ended, I moved intake, repair, and sales from Scrum to Kanban, because flow work needs flow management.

Result

Receiving-to-listing lead time dropped 35%, on-time delivery rose 25%, and end-to-end lead time fell 25 to 30% after the Kanban transition. The operation was deliberately built to be transferable, and that handoff is executed: processes documented, two operators trained, day-to-day moved to them.