Ronen Lazar and the price of standing still

Before Ronen Lazar worked on the problem of things that would not sell, an auction business operated from his living room. The setting has a pleasing lack of ceremony. A sofa is a perfectly respectable place to begin reorganizing commerce, provided someone eventually answers the phone. In this case, someone from the office of Robert L. Johnson, the co-founder of Black Entertainment Television, wanted a meeting in New York.

Lazar was working with Israel Schachter and Charlie Ifrah on Charity Bids, an online fundraising platform. The group registered the company in the United States using a friend’s Manhattan business address. Their operation acquired a Fifth Avenue mailing address before it acquired the surroundings usually implied by one. Together with Johnson, they created Club Charity. The enterprise was already learning a lesson that would recur in Lazar’s career: arranging a transaction requires more than putting an item in front of a buyer.

There were relationships to preserve, information to organize and several people with perfectly reasonable reasons to want the sale conducted their way. Those complications would eventually lead Lazar toward a warehouse full of unsold merchandise. The furniture changed. The interest in how value gets stuck remained.

A Prius, five brands and one auction

One Charity Bids project involved Tom Hanks’s 2004 Prius. Hanks wanted to auction the car for Welcome Back Veterans. Major League Baseball and the Entertainment Industry Foundation supported the effort; Club Charity was involved too. Five entities had an interest in promoting the auction, and each had its own audience and brand to protect.

The problem was wonderfully ordinary. Who should send visitors to whose website? Charity Bids allowed nonprofits to conduct auctions within their own sites, keeping supporters connected to the organization rather than sending them elsewhere. A sale could travel across several audiences without requiring everyone to surrender their front door.

In 2012, Schachter said that he, Lazar and Ifrah had collectively raised more than $20 million for charitable causes since joining forces in 2009. That was a statement about the partners’ fundraising work, rather than company revenue. It also gives Lazar’s later retail work a useful prehistory. He had already helped build software for situations in which money, ownership and reputation had to move together. The item might be a celebrity’s car; the difficulty lay in the arrangement around it.

The clothes were waiting. The files were travelling.

Lazar and Ifrah founded INTURN in 2013. By then, their working relationship stretched back seven years and several ventures. Their new subject was excess inventory: goods a brand or retailer still owned after the expected sale had failed to happen. Fashion supplied an especially unforgiving clock. A perfectly serviceable garment could lose commercial appeal while remaining exactly the same garment.

The existing sales process made that clock harder to ignore. Employees assembled spreadsheets from different inventory systems. Product images could be missing. Potential buyers were contacted in sequence. Negotiations left traces in emails and telephone records, rather than a useful shared history. The stock stood still while information about it took the scenic route.

INTURN organized product information and negotiations in private, invitation-only showrooms. Brands could select assortments for buyers and examine costs and margins. Privacy mattered because selling surplus also meant managing where discounted products appeared. Retail veterans Michael Newman, formerly of Ralph Lauren, and David Margolis, founder of TJX’s Winners division, helped guide the company. Lazar and Ifrah were bringing software into a trade whose practitioners already knew the stakes.

A marketplace with the curtains drawn

In a founders’ discussion published in January 2017, Lazar joined Fabrice Grinda of OLX and Allan Grant of Hired to talk about marketplaces. His description of INTURN departed from the cheerful picture of a public catalogue and a checkout button. Large assortments, confidentiality and rapidly changing inventory values made the business more complicated.

“Price is not always the determining factor for a sale,” he observed. That short remark explains much of the design. A buyer’s interest and a seller’s willingness depend on circumstances the price tag cannot convey. A brand may want goods sold outside its main market. A retailer needs an assortment that makes sense for its customers. The bargain needs somewhere suitable to go.

Lazar said INTURN launched its North American marketplace in May 2015 and was operating in Europe by September. He described software that helped suppliers prepare goods, attach information and visuals, analyze margins and enter orders. These tasks sat on either side of the transaction. The marketplace earned its usefulness before anyone agreed to buy. For Lazar, the work around the deal deserved as much attention as the moment when the deal closed.

“Excess inventory is an opportunity disguised as a problem.”

Ronen Lazar, 2017

The investor list had shop-floor knowledge

In January 2016, INTURN announced a $9.7 million Series A, bringing its total financing at that point to $13.6 million. Novel TMT Ventures led the round, with returning investors including Forerunner Ventures and Lerer Hippeau Ventures. New participants included investment groups associated with former Coach chairman Lew Frankfort and Intermix co-founder Khajak Keledjian, alongside Fabrice Grinda and others.

The names mattered for reasons beyond the size of the cheque. They connected the company with people familiar with fashion, brand value and the uncomfortable arithmetic of goods left over. Lazar described a competitive fundraising process in which choosing the final investors required balancing valuation, ownership and other considerations.

His advice to founders with limited money was less theatrical: build a comprehensive road map and budget, then keep track of where the capital goes. It is the same practical instinct visible in his inventory work. Resources become easier to manage when somebody can see them clearly. A fundraising announcement makes a handsome headline; knowing what remains in the bank is the daily occupation that follows it.

A long partnership behind the platform

Charlie Ifrah’s account of INTURN adds the human scale often missing from enterprise software. He described their shared starting point as studying how brands value stock through its lifecycle and how consumers perceive that value. The problem emerged through examination of an existing business, with its own habits and compromises.

Ifrah called Lazar family. He credited him with building relationships across industries, and described Abe Marciano, the company’s chief operating officer, as another close colleague who helped the business develop. Around them was a team whose interests included music, diving, photography, running and drone flying. These were the employees’ hobbies, rather than a borrowed list of Lazar’s accomplishments.

The distinction matters. A founder’s public story can easily swallow everyone standing nearby. INTURN’s story includes a product partner with years of shared experience, an operating colleague and employees doing the slow work of making software useful. Ifrah’s description gives the friendship substance without requiring a staged scene of founders agreeing over coffee. They had already spent years building things together.

The spreadsheet meets the enterprise

By March 2020, INTURN was teaming with SAP to offer its inventory disposition software through the SAP App Center. The offering brought inventory information into a centralized record, supporting collaboration among departments and across geographies. Product imagery and pricing tools helped teams work with curated assortments. The intended result was a more organized way to recover cash from stock that had slowed down.

This was a wider version of the original problem. Within a large consumer company, the people making decisions about goods may work in different teams, countries and systems. Even agreement on what is available has to be maintained. An inventory file can be meticulously assembled and still cease to describe reality when another department sells the goods.

Lazar spoke of aligning supply chains with markets and giving companies clearer control over inventory disposition. The language is businesslike, but the ambition is tangible. Money tied up in stock cannot simultaneously pay for the next shipment. Space occupied by yesterday’s assortment cannot welcome tomorrow’s. Making the information usable is a way of making those choices sooner, while there are still choices to make.

A new owner, then a familiar question

In November 2022, Mad Street Den acquired INTURN for an undisclosed amount. The New York inventory company joined a business whose Vue.ai offering focused on retail automation. Ashwini Asokan, Mad Street Den’s co-founder and CEO, announced the transaction. The acquisition brought together different parts of a retailer’s workflow: understanding products, managing goods and deciding how to put them in front of customers.

An acquisition gives a company’s history a date with an air of finality. The retail problem continued. Stock still had to be identified, priced and placed. Bringing INTURN into a broader automation business created another setting for work Lazar and Ifrah had begun almost a decade earlier.

In a subsequent conversation with Asokan, Lazar resisted the premise that software makes surplus disappear. “The problem never actually goes away,” he said. He distinguished slow-moving goods, which may retain useful selling life, from inventory facing a more immediate deadline. He also recalled explaining everyday off-price discounts to an interviewer, who replied that this sounded like every retailer. Consumers, he noted, had learned to expect a discount. The joke lands because the expectation is familiar; behind it sits a complicated negotiation over who absorbs the cost.

From the warehouse to the store ceiling

Lazar’s next chapter remains close to inventory. In January 2026, RADAR named him to lead its Commercial Growth & Marketing function after nearly a decade as an adviser. His public LinkedIn profile describes his work as leading commercial and go-to-market activity. The remit includes growth, revenue, market expansion and coordination among sales, marketing and partnerships.

RADAR uses overhead RFID sensors to track and locate tagged merchandise in stores. Its January announcement described 99% inventory accuracy and named Old Navy and American Eagle among its retail customers. That percentage is RADAR’s reported platform capability. It is a concrete measure of the business Lazar now helps bring to retailers, rather than a personal achievement to pin on his lapel.

The setting has moved closer to the customer. With INTURN, Lazar worked on the disposition of goods already left over. At RADAR, the work concerns knowing where stock is while the store is operating. Read together, the two chapters suggest a continuing interest in the information that allows a physical product to become a sale. A shirt cannot explain its whereabouts, its commercial prospects or the route it ought to take next. Lazar has spent years helping businesses give it a more useful record.