Jordan Allen, a prominent Spokane-area entrepreneur, is making waves in the startup arena yet again with his latest company, buyWander Inc., which does business as Wander.

Allen and the Spokane Valley-based company’s other co-founder, Matt McGee, are intent on efficiently processing and selling the myriad of returned retail items that often end up sitting in warehouses, destroyed, or in landfills.

“We’re helping retailers. We’re helping customers save money, and we’re helping the planet,” says Allen. 

Allen’s previous startups include the now-defunct vacation rental company Stay Alfred Inc., which reached $100 million in revenue not long before it was devastated by the pandemic, and Doorsey Inc., an online residential real estate bidding platform that was acquired last year by Dallas-based Auction.io.

In 2023, $743 billion in merchandise was returned in the U.S., according to a National Retail Federation report. As a percentage of sales, the total return rate for the year was 14.5%, with online returns having a higher return rate than brick-and-mortar returns.

“The return problem isn’t going away,” Allen says.

Wander purchases returned goods by the truckload at over 85% off retail, according to a pitch deck presentation provided to the Journal. The startup is self-funded so far, Allen says, with the first round of funding expected to happen early this month.

Those items are delivered to Wander’s Spokane Valley location, a 10,000-square-foot space at 2818 N. Sullivan, Suite 130, and then scanned onto the Wander platform once they arrive. The scanning technology used at Wander provides product descriptions and pricing information for each item, says McGee, an expert in supply-chain logistics who previously worked for online retailers Overstock.com and Wish.com, as well as Maersk, an international shipping company.

Allen and McGee—the startup’s only staff members for now—then provide a manual quality check to look for damage, ensure parts aren’t missing, and ensure items are properly functioning. Wander will add more employees as it grows, Allen says.

“That really gives our customers a solid understanding of what they’re bidding on, what the condition of that product is,” McGee says. “I think it’s critical for our consumers to have that trust.”

Following the inspection, the two co-founders then take photos of each item and upload the items to the company’s website, buywander.com, for a 24-hour, no-reserve auction. Bidding starts at $1 for each item.

After a customer wins an auction or auctions, they are able to pick up their items at the Spokane Valley site. Wander doesn’t offer shipping.

“We do curbside pickup only, because shipping and logistics is the destroyer of margin in this business,” Allen says.

Wander offers a seven-day free-return window. If an item isn’t bid on, its auction is reset for the following day.

Having just completed its beta-testing phase, Wander is expected to launch publicly Feb. 7.

The hope for Wander is to open more locations throughout the country, allowing for consumers to have access to items that were bought and returned in their city or region, Allen says.

“The vision for our company is we build a national brand that is purpose-built to process and sell returns,” says Allen.

Wander purchases items in bulk from a variety of retailers, Allen says.

“There are about 20 different places we buy from. Could be Amazon, Costco, Walmart, Target, REI, Bed Bath & Beyond, then you’ve got local and regional companies that deal with returns,” says Allen. “Longer term, we want to partner directly with those brands, so everything that gets sold into that city new doesn’t ever leave.”

For the most part, Wander is focused on buying and selling items that have damaged packaging, as opposed to damaged items or excess items that were overproduced but didn’t sell, Allen says. Items sold on Wander’s website are considered “new or like-new,” he says.

Wander purchases a diverse range of returned items. 

From knife sets, cookware sets, dog toys, kid toys, video games, camping gear, car parts, tools, and even Mike Pence and Kamala Harris bobbleheads, to larger items like furniture, refrigerators, trailers, and build-a-home kits, Wander doesn’t have many limitations on the types of merchandise it will buy and sell, Allen says.

When a customer returns an item to a retailer, it is usually shipped back to the warehouse it came from—wherever that may be—and rather than being repackaged and resold as new, it often piles up in a warehouse, is destroyed, or is discarded because the cost of dealing with return items is often too high for retailers, Allen says.

“Retailers aren’t built to process individual items,” Allen says. “Imagine all the stuff that we’re buying right now in Spokane, online or in stores, that gets returned. Why is it not sold back in Spokane the next day?”

Many retailers and e-commerce companies have developed generous return policies because they want to keep customers happy and coming back, Allen says.

“They’ve already baked it into their margins,” says Allen.

While working at Wish.com, McGee says the online retailer had returned items that couldn’t be shipped back to China, for example, so they just piled up in a warehouse. Wish.com eventually resorted to paying its warehouse provider to liquidate the items, he says.

“It wasn’t something that we recouped any money on those returns,” says McGee. “We were actually paying money to get rid of those.”

Wander offers a solution for retailers.

“It frees up capital for the retailers, it frees up the space within their warehouse, and also frees up the labor that’s associated with processing those returns,” McGee says.

The timing for a company like this is beneficial for consumers, too, Allen adds.

“Things are getting super expensive,” Allen says. “People need to be able to get ahead, and you can’t do that buying brand-new, high-end stuff, but maybe there’s an opportunity to buy it for a discount.”

While many Wander customers may be in the Spokane and Spokane Valley area, Allen says he expects customers from surrounding areas to buy large volumes of goods and travel to the Spokane Valley site to pick them up.

The Spokane Valley location already has thousands of returned items, Allen says. He eventually wants to see that number grow into the millions as the company expands and opens other sites.

“We want to make sure that things are really dialed in here before we go to our next location,” Allen says.