Month: November 2025

• An eight-slide pitch deck helped raise money for Postmoda’s pivot to a platform that sells designer returns.
• The startup was originally a peer-to-peer clothing rental company.
• It has raised money from major VC firms, like Slow Ventures and Long Journey Ventures, as well as entrepreneurs.

We’ve all been there: You’re shopping online, amass a full cart, and check out.

You’re over budget, but chances are those jeans won’t fit right or that jacket will be too similar to the one you already own. At least one thing will end up in the return pile in your corner and make its way back to the seller.

E-commerce — with its ease of purchase and lack of trying on — has led to ballooning returns. About 20% of items purchased online are expected to be returned this year, according to an October report by the National Retail Federation.

Most of those returns are not relisted for sale. The costs — both in terms of time and labor — required to get products back online are often not worth it. Instead, items are loaded onto palettes to be sold to liquidators, shipped to other countries, or sent to a landfill.

“Where is it ending up? Nobody would talk to us about it. Brands wouldn’t talk to us, merchandising officers wouldn’t talk to us,” Adarsh Alphons, the cofounder and CEO of Postmoda, told Business Insider. “They wouldn’t acknowledge it as a problem.”

That’s because the answer isn’t good for business or the world at large. In 2023, apparel companies spent $25.1 billion in processing costs for returns, estimated a Coresight Research survey of 100 apparel retailers. That same year, more than 8 billion pounds of returns were sent to landfills, according to Optoro, a company specializing in returns solutions.

“They just think of it as the cost of doing business,” Alphons said.

He is hoping to solve that.

Postmoda, which launches to the public later this week, plans to offer luxury and designer returns — taking them off the hands of retailers, keeping them out of landfills, and offering them to shoppers at a discount.

This is Postmoda’s second form. The first, called Wardrobe, was a peer-to-peer apparel rental platform launched in 2021. Alphons raised $5.6 million over two funding rounds from investors such as Slow Ventures and Long Journey Ventures, he said.

But about a year after launch, he felt his business model, which used dry cleaners as middlemen, wasn’t scalable.

Alphons took a break to reassess the market and talk to stakeholders. Returns were a pain point — and they were becoming a bigger one.

“There was this huge slush that was growing because the return rates are so high because of e-commerce,” he said.

Alphons knew what he wanted to do — and after testing the theory by selling millions of returned items on Poshmark and eBay, he knew that it could work.

He just needed a little more money. He put together an eight-slide deck and went back to his original investors.

“They’re just so glad that I was able to find a business that is adjacent to our business and actually see revenue,” Alphons.

Existing investors, such as Opendoor cofounder JD Ross and Vine cofounder Rus Yusupov, hoped to capitalize on the growing number of returns and the increasingly popular secondhand luxury model. They invested an additional $200,000 in January 2023. Alphons said Postmoda has since been building tech and relationships with retailers.

Postmoda is far from the only early-stage company to attempt a pivot. Many successful businesses, such as Slack and YouTube, have achieved success by adapting their business models to meet market needs. The question is whether Postmoda can pull it off.

“Founding things usually has to do with persevering and staying at it,” Alphons said. “Overnight success is actually a very rare thing. It will be like five years, and then all of a sudden, you figure it out.”

Now that he has figured it out, he’s putting his foot on the gas. Next year, he plans on raising a Series A to scale up the marketplace and partnerships.

Here’s Postmoda’s pitch deck.

Postmoda’s deck starts with a cover slide and a promise to make money

Next, the deck lays out the problem Postmoda is solving: the cost of returns

The slide reads:

Returns need a loss-minimization solution

On average 1 out of 4 fashion e-commerce purchases are returned by customers. This is aggravated by overall e-comm growth, bad habits in customers such as ‘wardrobing’ and increased return-shipping and processing costs for brands.

The deck outlines the benefits of Postmoda, including the financial and sustainability ones

This slide says:

Meet Postmoda

We take the pain out of returns

Postmoda can enable retailers to profitably & sustainably monetize their customer-returned inventory, while maintaining brand standards, providing unprecedented data insights and customer acquisition opportunities.

Brands use our platform for these four benefits:

1. Increase profitability and loss-minimization
2. Sustainability
3. Customer acquisition
4. Analytics & Insights

Postmoda tested its new business model before seeking additional funding

This slide walks through how Postmoda works, step by step

Postmoda’s supply chain starts when a customer initiates a return, which is then routed to one of Postmoda’s warehouses. AI screens the item and sets its price. If it sells, the original retailer receives a cut of the sales, as well as data on the purchaser.

The deck outlines the benefits for retailers as well

Postmoda’s pitch to retailers includes profitability, customer acquisition, insights, and environmental, social, and governance compatibility.

This slide introduces Alphons and Postmoda’s existing investors

This slide includes a bio of Alphons, who, it states, has received numerous accolades for founding a nonprofit that provides art classes for students.

The final slide directs people to Postmoda’s website.

• Life360 CEO Lauren Antonoff told Business Insider that the secret to remote work was “more in-person meetings.”
• Antonoff said that Life360 put its budget for office space into travel for employee meet-ups.
• As for the return-to-office movement, Antonoff said that the philosophy “makes no sense.”

As hardcore work culture surges, many companies are demanding their employees return to the office for more and more days. Life360 is fine staying at home.

Much has changed for the family tracking app company since its 2024 IPO, including naming Microsoft and GoDaddy alum Lauren Antonoff as its new CEO. Antonoff was previously COO.

One thing that hasn’t changed is its remote work policy. In an interview with Business Insider, Antonoff said that the company was “remote-first” and that it wouldn’t be changing anytime soon.

“The secret of making remote work isn’t better online meetings, it’s more in-person meetings,” Antonoff said. “Life360 had taken the budget that used to be dedicated for buildings and those types of things and put it into travel.”

Antonoff called from a Deskpass coworking space, where she said some of the engineering leaders had congregated. She said that Life360’s in-person meet-ups were meant for “getting to know each other” and “working through one or two hard problems.”

“The return-to-office movements are all like, ‘Let’s just force people to sit next to each other while they all have their headsets and they’re on Zoom,'” Antonoff said. “It makes no sense.”

Life360 is one of a handful of companies leaning into remote work culture. Dropbox CEO Drew Houston compared RTO mandates to trying to get people back into malls and movie theaters.

Some companies, like Atlassian, have found that remote work is a hiring boon. Others, like Klarna, say they lost talent to companies with stronger in-person cultures.

Microsoft has also recently pushed for in-office work, moving to a three-day RTO. Microsoft EVP and CPO Amy Coleman said that the AI era requires the “kind of energy and momentum that comes from smart people working side by side.”

Antonoff said that she “grew up” at Microsoft, having spent nearly 20 years there. At Microsoft, Antonoff said that she was working with people in “different offices” around the world, even when she was in person.

Antonoff said she’s also seen how in-office culture can unfairly prize proximity.

“You bias the people who sit near you,” Antonoff said. “The eye-opener for me was when we all got forced to work remotely. It normalized very quickly that everybody was equidistant from the center of power.”

Antonoff has also worked at GoDaddy, where she served as president of the company’s US small business segment. She said that GoDaddy was “more productive during the pandemic.”

One of Antonoff’s other favorite workplace policies: synchronized vacations.

Twice a year, Life360’s about 500 employees all take one week off, save for a small slice of workers performing “critical functions,” Antonoff said.

Vacations are normally a “mixed blessing,” Antonoff said, because employees will return to a stack of work in their inbox. Some employees even check their emails while taking time off to avoid future pain, she said. Not at Life360.

“You really can take time off,” she said. “You really can unplug because you’re not missing out on meetings.”

“It’s like the best vacation you’ve ever had because a real vacation.”

• Companies are now considering hiring humans to manage AI agents.
• Companies are using AI agents, which autonomously handle tasks, to improve workflows.
• Managing agents may need less experience than managing humans, but more technical skill.

Back in 2023, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made an observation about his company:

“I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work,” he said during a company Q&A session, The Verge reported at the time.

Then came the great flattening. Companies from Meta to Citi began to cull their ranks of middle managers.

Now, the AI age is offering a new twist to the story of middle management.

“I think you’re just going to see a different modality within a company, which is an agent manager,” Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, the chief operating officer at Vercel, told Business Insider.

Agents have become one of the central innovations of 2025. They’re commonly defined as virtual assistants that can complete tasks autonomously. They break down problems, outline plans, and take action without being prompted by a user.

Companies are racing to implement them to help them work faster. Vercel, a $9.3 billion cloud-based developer platform founded in 2015, recently trained an AI agent on its best-performing sales representative. The machine is so effective that the company downsized its 10-person sales team to a single top performer and moved the remaining nine to a different team.

Managing a team of agents requires different skills from managing a team of people.

“You have to understand where you want to go, what the North Star is, what excellence looks like, and be able to explain that to someone,” Grosser said about managing people. It’s a job that typically requires years of experience and a healthy dose of tact.

Becoming an AI agent manager might have a lower barrier to entry, though it requires different technical skills.

“The future is you might graduate from college and you’re a manager now,” she said. “We’re all going to have to learn to delegate, to break down tasks, etcetera, to produce the type of output that you want from your agent teammate.”

Grosser didn’t say whether Vercel will be posting a job like this anytime soon, but said it’s something the company is “contemplating.”

Last month, Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr.com, an online community for founders of SaaS and B2B companies, posted on LinkedIn that the first $200,000 sales development representative role is “coming.”

The job involves managing “10+ AI SDR agents” and requires a candidate to be “pretty technical,” he wrote.

Saurabh Sarbaliya, the chief technology officer and AI lead at PwC, told Business Insider that companies will likely try to train their existing workforce to take on this kind of role before recruiting external candidates.

“I need our existing workforce to be able to become agent managers,” he said. “We need to be able to actually go and up-skill our people on how to actually go and become good agent managers,” he said.

Good agent managers should be able to train agents, give them context, review their behavior, and design workflows that are very “intentional,” he said. That includes requiring an agent to consult a human before it goes on to execute specific actions, he said.