Andy Ruben and the trouble with a perfectly good jacket

A perfectly good jacket can cause a surprising amount of trouble. Someone has stopped wearing it. Someone else would like it. Between those two people sit a closet door, a price nobody has agreed on, and the possibility that selling it will be more bother than it is worth. Andy Ruben has spent years working on that interval. At one point, it nearly swallowed his company.

His first answer was Yerdle, a consumer platform for sharing and exchanging useful things. It attracted more than a million members. Yet Ruben grew uneasy with the difference between people admiring the service and using it. A brand’s clothing might appear beside miscellaneous household parts. The inventory was eclectic; the experience could be awkward. A jacket had acquired the wrong neighbours.

Ruben’s eventual answer was to give brands the machinery to run resale themselves. That business became Trove. The change required a founder to question something he had already spent years building. It also returned him to familiar territory: retailers, their customers, and the practical work between a good idea and a completed transaction.

A jacket with the wrong neighbours

The passage between the two businesses was rough. Ruben explored selling the company; two potential deals fell through. The team dwindled from roughly 60 people to five. He considered leaving the CEO role. The eventual recovery would look tidier on a chart than it had felt inside the office.

By 2021, Trove ranked 268th on the Inc. 5000, with reported three-year revenue growth of 1,744 percent. Those figures belong to that period. They show how sharply the business changed after its reset; they do little to convey the experience of deciding that an existing company needs to become something else.

The distinction matters. A founder can endure difficulty for the sake of an idea. Difficulty alone offers no instruction about whether the idea deserves another year. Ruben’s story turns on that judgment: the goods still had value, but the route through which people accessed them needed changing.

The assignment he kept declining

Ruben’s education began in civil engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also earned an MBA. A university case study describes a Columbus, Ohio native who had backpacked from southern Chile to Alaska. His later working life would bring him closer to freight, packaging and inventory than to a hiking trail.

He joined Walmart in 2002 and moved into its strategy leadership. Sustainability initially arrived as one concern among many. CEO Lee Scott wanted him to lead it. Ruben wanted responsibility for a conventional operating business and twice resisted the assignment.

He recalls a third conversation aboard a plane, with Scott doing a crossword puzzle. The boss made his view clear; Ruben accepted. The scene is a useful corrective to the idea of a career unfolding from a childhood mission statement. An executive with a puzzle can rearrange your future before finishing his own.

In October 2005, Walmart publicly set three environmental goals: renewable energy, zero waste, and products that sustained resources and the environment. Ruben’s task was to help turn that ambition into decisions across an enormous retailer. The work demanded a connection between long-term consequences and the concerns of people running stores, buying merchandise and moving freight.

During a radio interview that month, he discussed the commercial logic behind the programme, including energy costs and more efficient transport. The language was recognisably retail language. Electricity and diesel had prices. Waste represented something purchased, handled and then paid for again on its way out.

That made sustainability an operating question with a place in the accounts. It also made implementation depend on people whose daily priorities already filled a working day. An elegant strategy still needed someone to decide what belonged on a shelf and how it would get there.

Black Friday, in reverse

Yerdle launched publicly on Black Friday 2012. The timing suited a service asking people to share goods on a day devoted to buying them. Adam Werbach, Ruben’s cofounder, brought his own environmental background; engineer Carl Tashian brought experience from Zipcar’s founding team.

The name was intended as a new word for sharing. Six letters, a curious sound, and considerable faith that people would learn another verb. The initial model evolved from borrowing to a marketplace with its own credits. The enduring interest was the useful object already nearby.

In 2013, Ruben proposed that closets and garages would function as future distribution centres. It was a retail observation disguised as a household one. Goods existed. They had already been manufactured and delivered. Finding a way to release them from storage might spare someone another purchase.

“The distribution centers of the future are our closets and garages.”

Andy Ruben / 2013

Patagonia invested in Yerdle in 2014 through its venture fund. That Black Friday, the companies arranged clothing swaps in eight stores, with food, music and refreshments. Patagonia items also appeared in a dedicated Yerdle collection. The partnership gave a practical setting to an idea that might otherwise have remained a persuasive speech.

Patagonia already had Worn Wear, which began in 2012 with swaps and grew into repairs and other ways to extend clothing’s life. In 2017, Ruben’s business helped launch its online resale platform. The dates tell a more interesting story than a single launch announcement: a relationship, and a programme, developed over time.

A second sale needs a first-class operation

Trove’s work sat behind branded storefronts. A returned garment had to be identified, inspected, graded, priced and placed into inventory. The retailer needed a way to accept trade-ins and give customers credit. The next shopper needed enough confidence to buy an item with a previous owner.

Ruben liked the comparison with certified preowned cars. A familiar dealer could know the product, explain its condition and stand behind it. In clothing, the brand could provide a similarly recognisable setting. The appeal went beyond saving money: someone who liked a particular label could return to that label for used goods.

Used inventory brings its own complications. Two items with the same original product name can arrive in different conditions. A shop cannot simply treat them as identical units. The peculiarities that give a garment character also give an inventory system homework.

For Ruben, the early focus on Patagonia, REI and Eileen Fisher allowed the company to develop the experience with a small group of partners. There was processing to organise, value to assess and online shopping to make coherent. A tighter customer list could mean a deeper understanding of what the operation actually required.

In May 2022, Gayle Tait succeeded him as Trove’s CEO. She had joined as president after roles at Google and L’Oréal. Ruben became executive chair. His responsibilities changed as the business grew, a reminder that founding an organisation and running its next phase can call for different arrangements.

The trouble with a smaller cereal box

Some of Ruben’s most useful lessons came from changes that disappointed him. While leading Walmart’s private-label business, he tried reducing cereal-box packaging. He later described how the surrounding category and business system limited the effect. The sensible-looking adjustment carried more dependencies than he had anticipated.

A concentrated detergent could save shelf space and materials together. A smaller cereal package had to make sense within a broader set of expectations. The difference helps explain his attention to operations: a proposed improvement needs people, incentives and routines that allow it to last.

He has also argued that resale’s environmental value depends on what it replaces. Keeping goods circulating matters more when buying them displaces demand for new production. Counting a resale transaction alone leaves the harder question unanswered. What would that customer have bought otherwise?

His hiring reflections have a similar specificity. He describes culture and good appointments as central to the business, and emphasises deciding what a role must accomplish before selecting someone. A familiar person with an impressive history can still be wrong for the particular task ahead. The work should write the job description.

The next box is still sealed

Ruben’s latest company, Clarity Systems, moves the attention from a garment’s second owner to a returned product’s contents. He cofounded it with Darrell Whitelaw and Sender Shamiss. In August 2026, Clarity announced a $4.4 million seed round led by LMnT Ventures.

The company combines imaging and AI to check goods without unpacking them, looking for counterfeits, swapped components and missing parts. Its promise is faster verification where products enter the returns process. A box’s reassuring exterior may say little about what is inside.

ReturnPro announced a partnership with Clarity in February 2026 for its North American returns centres. The planned use puts the technology inside an existing flow of goods. There, a machine’s usefulness depends on whether it helps people make decisions while the work keeps moving.

Ruben became Clarity’s CEO and Zevia’s board chair that February; his Trove chair tenure ended in January. He also serves on the boards of Goodwill Industries International and FortNine and advises BCG and Earthshot Ventures. The range is wide, but retail’s physical realities remain close at hand.

Across these chapters, he keeps returning to an unfinished transaction. Something has been made, purchased, stored or sent back. Its next use is uncertain. The work begins with looking closely enough to see what is still valuable, then building a route through which someone else can use it. A jacket waiting in a closet makes a modest invitation. Ruben has found enough in it to keep changing jobs.