She looked at the pile of clothes a brand can no longer sell and saw a balance sheet, not a landfill.
CO-FOUNDER & CEO, REVIVE // FORMERLY HEMSTER // NEW YORK
Most garments earn their keep exactly once. A jacket is designed, sourced, sewn, photographed, shipped, sold - and then, more often than the industry likes to admit, returned. From there it usually disappears: recycled, donated, or destroyed. Allison Lee built a company on the unglamorous middle step everyone else skipped. Revive, the New York fashion-tech firm she co-founded and runs as CEO, takes a brand's returned and "unstockable" inventory, inspects it item by item, decides what a sensible repair budget looks like, refurbishes it through vetted vendors, and gets it back into the market.
The financial logic is blunt. A single return can cost a brand more than $15 to process, store, and dispose of, and the online apparel return rate now sits around 24.4% - up roughly 50% since 2020. Lee's pitch is that all of that supposedly worthless inventory is a misfiled asset. Refurbished goods are either resold by the brand itself or listed on channels like eBay and ThredUp, with Revive taking a commission. To date the company has run roughly $23 million in merchandise through its system and grown 46x in under a year.
We want to be the household name for idle inventory.- Allison Lee, on Revive's ambition
Lee grew up in South Korea, where having a garment altered at the point of sale was ordinary. She arrived in the United States in the eighth grade - around age 13 - and noticed that retailers here sold clothes in fixed sizes with no customization on offer. That gap stuck with her.
It took a while to turn into a company. At UC Berkeley she studied psychology, not computer science, and a founder's life was nowhere on her radar. Her first real exposure to startups came on campus. After college she landed at Peel, an Alibaba-backed IoT company, where as Director of Monetization she grew revenue from $20K to $15M ARR in under two years. The catch: without a technical background, she couldn't get a product manager title or ship products of her own.
Since I couldn't add new products to my portfolio, I decided I would just make my own.- Allison Lee
So in 2017 she launched Hemster, a SaaS tailoring and repair platform she has described as the first of its kind. Hemster 1.0 went live inside the fitting rooms at Westfield San Francisco Centre, capturing fit data and offering virtual tailoring shoppers could reuse. By 2019 it had personalized around 50,000 items and earned her a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
When COVID-19 shut down in-person retail, Hemster's core service - tailoring inside physical stores - ground to a halt. Lee didn't fold. She had something most stalled startups don't: a data-science engine built to analyze how clothes fit. She pointed it at a different problem.
That problem was returns. Lee realized every brand she'd worked with had damaged goods piling up in stores and warehouses, with no scalable way to recover their value. The fit-analysis infrastructure became a damage-assessment engine. Revive was born: ship the returns in, let the system recommend a repair budget, refurbish through ethical vendors, then resell. The estimated value of discarded inventory across the industry runs toward $1 trillion - a number that turns a niche pivot into a market.
It would be naive not to acknowledge that it was a risky move.- Allison Lee, on the pivot to Revive
In 2024 Revive announced a $3.5M raise led by Equal Ventures, with Hustle Fund, Coalition Operators, Banter Capital, and Charge Ventures joining. The company is B-Corp certified and headquartered in New York.
Figures cited by Revive / AlleyWatch, 2024. Online apparel returns up ~50% since 2020.
She rebuilt Hemster's fit-analysis tech into Revive's damage-assessment engine. Nothing wasted - not even the company's own code.
First-time, female, immigrant founder. She calls the underdog tag "the strongest motivator if you let it."
Ask about a favorite escape and she names hiking near New Paltz in upstate New York.
If you're meant to be doing something, you'll know. Don't be afraid to take risks - but be prepared to face the challenges.- Allison Lee, advice to founders
Because of my background as a first time, female, immigrant founder, I am often dubbed as an underdog. I have come to love and embrace that tag on me.- Allison Lee