Employee Spotlight: Emel Meteoglu – Vice President of Product

We’re pleased to announce that Emel Meteoglu, Vice President of Product at B-Inventory, has been named one of many  High 50 Girls Leaders of San Francisco for 2023 by Girls We Admire!

Emel is an achieved government and product chief with a ardour for constructing easy-to-use, helpful, and modern merchandise from the bottom up at a global scale, from defining the technical structure to getting ready to go to market technique. At B-Inventory, she leads a workforce liable for product growth, income development, person expertise, analytics, and company and product technique.

Be taught extra about Emel’s background and imaginative and prescient for B-Inventory under.  

Q: Are you able to inform us a bit of bit about your background?

“I went to highschool in Turkey for Product Administration Engineering. I do know it’s a cliché, however I knew from a younger age that I needed to change into a product supervisor to bridge the hole between enterprise (gross sales, advertising and marketing, assist) and engineering.”

Q: What introduced you to B-Inventory?

“A few issues had been happening in my life. One, I used to be prepared for a brand new journey, however I needed to do one thing significant. I needed to make use of my expertise to assist folks. The second factor happening was, we’d simply gotten a home and I used to be buying rather a lot, and shopping for furnishings—and sadly, I used to be returning a few of it. As a result of excessive price, in case you pay full value and assume the merchandise could also be broken, as an finish person, you wish to return it. You wish to be sure that if you’re paying full value, you’re getting the very best high quality attainable. 

As she went by means of the method of returning a desk she’d ordered that arrived with a dent on it, her dad and mom—who had been visiting—had been amazed by the versatile return insurance policies, which aren’t distinguished in Emel’s native Turkey: “If you wish to return one thing there, you actually must combat. Even when it’s faulty, chances are you’ll not get your a reimbursement. The shopper just isn’t at all times proper.” 

This obtained Emel considering: within the midst of seemingly limitless returns, the place does the merchandise find yourself, and the way a lot waste is being generated? Is there a approach to cross these returned gadgets on to secondary finish customers and generate financial savings? The reply she got here up with was: by means of “second life givers;” Emel’s time period for consumers. And simply as she contemplated these prospects, B-Inventory reached out, as if by means of serendipity.

“I do know there are lots of conventional  liquidation channels, however this business is so fragmented and open to disruption. We are able to undoubtedly construct one thing helpful for everyone—retailers, resellers, and finish customers! Furthermore, this additionally obtained me considering that I can truly not solely assist folks, however assist Earth by giving these merchandise a second, third, fourth life. That basically drew me in. I’m lastly going to do one thing significant, so 10 years from now I can inform my children the platform we constructed helped convey billions of returned merchandise again to life. I’m very enthusiastic about what we will construct. The alternatives that we will create for resellers and for fixing inefficiencies, and the ache factors that we will remedy for retailers is limitless. As I inform my very own workforce, sky’s the restrict. We simply must focus and construct it proper.”

Emel’s imaginative and prescient for B-Inventory goes past promoting overstock to vetted consumers—it means that we will change into a significant participant within the gig economic system, fostering the way forward for consumers and serving to them not solely develop, however study alongside the way in which:

Q: How do you envision B-Inventory enabling folks to develop into elite consumers?

“Uber has 900,000 drivers within the U.S. It’s not unrealistic to think about having a million second life givers assist us discover returned merchandise second properties. 

The variety of second life givers is just restricted by the variety of adults within the inhabitants, and also you don’t even must personal a automotive to start out your facet hustle! For this reason I consider the sky’s the restrict: we will lengthen our platform in a means that we can assist second life givers begin their enterprise in the event that they don’t know the best way to begin; assist them create their very own web site, acquire a enterprise license, or present training: Enterprise 101. We’ll stroll with them, facet by facet from the start. We’ll assist them construct, handle, and develop their enterprise in order that increasingly more folks can do that job and assist us convey extra merchandise into life.

Q: What’s your imaginative and prescient for sellers?

On the vendor facet, we want to consider how we will onboard extra merchandise onto our platform. How can we make sellers’ lives simpler? How can we combine extra into the vendor so it’s much less cumbersome for them and it’s simple to add the stock in our system? How can we remedy different issues for them by means of scanning, lotting, and sorting?”

Q: Sooner or later, what do you hope you may say you probably did with B-Inventory?

“I’m envisioning that there will probably be state legal guidelines that say no reusable product goes to landfill; it should be resold. I  would additionally prefer to see B-Inventory because the ecosystem of giving merchandise a second life, in order that it connects all of the gamers, comparable to returns and stock administration companies, logistics, warehouses and achievement facilities, and even different liquidators!

Once I see these two issues taking place, I’ll say we made it: we created a platform to save lots of Earth. And that’s what I’ll strive so long as I’m right here.”

Requested what her necessities are for working with a product or firm, Emel had this to say:

“As a product supervisor and chief, serving to others is what motivates me. I wish to construct helpful merchandise which can be simple to make use of and modern. These are my three standards:

It ought to disrupt the prevailing business and the methods during which we function.
It needs to be helpful to others by addressing their ache factors and offering worth.
It needs to be intuitive and easy.”