Barry O’Kane: Welcome back to HappyPorch Radio, the Circular Economy Technology Podcast, where together with leading experts, thinkers, and doers, we explore the intersection of technology and the circular economy. 

I am Barry, the founder of HappyPorch. We provide software engineering expertise for a more circular economy. 

Tandi Tuakli:  I'm Tandi and I've been working in fashion and technology for nearly 20 years. I help brands create circular business models that not only extend the life of their products, but also generate revenue and increase customer loyalty.

Barry O’Kane: In this episode we are joined by Ryan Atkins. Ryan is the co-founder and CEO of Supercycle, which is a circular commerce platform to enable rental and resale natively in Shopify.

We covered a huge amount in this conversation. Was there something that particularly stood out for you, Tandi?

Tandi Tuakli: I think what was really interesting is how Ryan highlighted the fact that when you're thinking about circular business models in this discussion, we were focused on rental. It's not just about revenue, but you also have to think about it as a way to grow your business. Not just in terms of acquiring more customers, but thinking about events like Covid or now with tariffs, kind of shoring up your business against these unpredictable events that might make you more reliant on different sources of revenue.

Barry O’Kane:  Yeah. Ryan shared his own story of how Covid affected him there and how that led in a way to starting Supercycle. And we're also obviously seeing big changes this year, so it's fascinating to reflect on the role of rental and circular, generally on that. 

I think the other thing that stood out for me in this conversation was Ryan's emphasis on partnership and collaboration. That's something that I feel really passionately about as well and how important that is, not just because that's how we operate, well, one of our roles is to implement and integrate technology, but because I think that's genuinely a requirement for successful circularity.

We touched on this and so much more, so I hope everybody listening enjoyed this conversation as much as we did. 

Let's meet Ryan.

Ryan Atkins: I’m Ryan Atkins, co-founder and CEO here at Supercycle, we're building a circular commerce platform, which enables rental, resale products of service and library of things by business models. And we enable that natively inside Shopify. So that can be used either by, or we would refer to as a circular first startup, someone that's building their business to be 100% of revenue from not new products.

Or it could be a linear business that's looking to introduce rental and resale in conjunction with linear and from new business.

Barry O’Kane: Awesome, and welcome to HappyPorch Radio.

Ryan Atkins: Thanks for having me.

Barry O’Kane: As a sort of scene setting, let's talk a little bit more about what Supercycle is, why you chose the Shopify platform to integrate with, and I guess a little bit about what led you to where you are now?

Ryan Atkins: Interesting. So I've been in and around Shopify for probably about a decade. Prior to starting this I built up and then eventually sold a Shopify Plus agency. Some of the biggest websites on Shopify we designed, built, and then provided the growth services for those businesses. And over that decade, increasingly towards the end, it just became very apparent to me that the only lever that these businesses have to growing is manufacturing more things, selling more things, which makes sense. That's the world we've created. And, you know, I love entrepreneurship and I like the promise of capitalism.

Like if you create value in this world, I think we should be rewarded for the value that we create. But it does have some sharp edges to it. And it started to feel like I was contributing more to that sharp edge perhaps than I wanted to do. But I had built up this decade of experience and passion for e-commerce entrepreneurship, and it was “How can I use this network, use this knowledge, use this passion, use this deep understanding of a merchant and how they need to grow their businesses and apply that to some good in the world?”

As a sort of side quest to the agency at the time, I was building and launching my own businesses. So I had a letterbox flower business, had a vintage clothes business where we were primarily, kind of, importing secondhand clothing from the US. So it was lots of workwear, Carhartt jackets, Dickies, as well as American sportswear, that sort of thing.

I was getting exposure to circularity through some of the challenges. During Covid every single business was set on fire. The vintage clothes business which I had faced a shipping crisis, could not get more products in from the US. So what we had sold incredibly well. You know, I think we had some of our best months, but we ran out of products. The letterbox flower business, everyone was sending each other flowers. That was wonderful. But we were using Royal Mail to deliver them all, and Royal Mail's delivering everything three or four days late. So the flowers were dying in the boxes. So I was shipping five or six times more boxes, but I was also refunding, you know, 20, 30% of those boxes that went out, which is more than the margin we were making. We had a lab-grown diamond business and an engagement ring business. Were people getting engaged during Covid? They weren't, no. In fact, divorce rates went through the roof.

And then we had the agency, the business that helps people build and grow e-commerce. When everyone's going to e-commerce, surely that's gonna do well? And what actually happened is our entire order book disappeared overnight.

People were either so worried about money that, you know, any money they've allocated to their new website, that's off the table. Or the opposite was true, they were doing so well that the last thing they wanna worry about is a new website when they just wanna put all their energy into, you know, getting this influx of new orders out the door.

So kind of everything set on fire all at the same time. I was in quite good shape before that happened and I'm still just going through the journey now, from the weight loss I put on during that incredibly stressful period. And obviously that entire life, putting a decade and a half into kind of building these businesses up and kind of reaching a point where it felt like almost overnight that all of that was going to disappear.

And it gives you a lot of time to reflect. I spent a lot of time thinking about “How can I continue in the world of entrepreneurship but bring some more purpose back to what I'm doing?”

And that exposure to circularity, that exposure to e-commerce, those two things really came together for me. And if I can give merchants a way of growing their business, but not from new manufacturing but instead through rental, through products or service, through resale, we can continue to grow these businesses, but that growth not be so dependent on net new manufacturing and the sharp end of consumerism and capitalism.

Tandi Tuakli: Ryan, what would you say then is, like, the main problem for businesses that you wanted to solve, for businesses that then wanted to go in this new direction as you did? When you thought about starting Supercycle, what was the vision that you had about what problem you were trying to solve?

Ryan Atkins: So, there were two things that were quite apparent to me. So someone that obviously spends a lot of time thinking about technology, but also thinking about, you know, P&Ls and how they work and how you scale a business and how you make cost of goods work and all that kind of stuff. I was looking at the poster child, if you like, of circularity, and I looked at people,  Rent the Runway. I was going through their earnings and I created a Sankey diagram of how their revenue comes in and then how it goes back out again. It was basically revenue comes in, 20 or 30% of that revenue is going out to R&D. I'm slightly inflating here, but let's say a third is going to R&D and building the platform and that's technology required to do circularity at scale.

About a third was then going to the cost of goods of the product, which is quite high, comparative to brands where I'm used to them, you know, paying ten dollars for it and selling over a hundred dollars. Like the margin was quite low comparative, and I guess that's a longer payback period.

And then the other third was on acquiring customers which was basically leaving no real margin left. And it was these circular businesses are trying to spin the plate of essentially having the R&D costs of a technology business, the margins of a retail business, if not slightly more spread because oftentimes they're sharing that revenue with the merchant or with the brand, with the manufacturer. And there's a slightly longer payback period and there's still a little bit of a higher cost of customer acquisition because they're bringing those brands to the table.

So part one was, Well, okay, if I can reduce that one third, and, you know, give them a third of their revenue back as profit, those circular businesses are overnight now much more profitable, which I think will do two things. One, existing circular businesses can create much more margin by taking away the R&D costs. But secondly, it enables more circular first businesses to launch because they don't need to spend a hundred million dollars, which is what Urban Outfitters spent building newly or the 20% of revenue. So there'd be more circular businesses if the technology R&D component was taken away. 

But then second, I was also thinking about brands and that those three plates disappear with a brand. If you are the brand themself you have your own e-commerce website, you already have traffic. So you're not paying a third of your revenue split. You're bringing a customer to the site. They're already there. And 1% of those are maybe buying something and what you're offering to the other 99% I think that should be circular. So you take away that cost of customer acquisition. Obviously we then take away the R&D cost and then that cost of goods.

If you are the brand, you have much more margin to start with, but oftentimes there's also a pool of stock set in not new returns. So there's often a cost center in your business from returns, which can no longer go back to a new condition that can then become the circular stock. So the unit economics of these businesses, which I'm hugely inspired by, but you know, just as a financial allocator, don't love the P&Ls, how can I love the concept and love the P&Ls? 

And that's essentially where I came to it from Supercycle. It's where do I think the end destination of clarity ends up and Supercycle is banking on what we're building, being the end destination of what would be required for circular to be ubiquitous.

Barry O'Kane: I love that, that's a really clear starting with the mission, a big, broad mission in mind. So let's bring that back to the sort of the concrete, what you've built now with Supercycle and how that fits into that platform or the tech stack that you're describing that people have to build or invest in?

Ryan Atkins: Yeah, absolutely. So we've basically built circular, completely natively into Shopify. And really this is kind of one of the big unlocks. Shopify spends a billion dollars a year on R&D. They have an incredible checkout of discounting system and APIs and ecosystem of loyalty apps and accounting integrations and cross border.

And it's becoming, you know, the pipes of commerce. It's the infrastructure of which, you know, commerce happens on the internet and increasingly in-store. Now, obviously there are the platforms of the providers but I'm pretty heavy into, Shopify being, kind of the leader.

So what we wanted to do was a couple of things: where can we not reinvent as much stuff as possible? So we build into Shopify. Your product page is your Shopify product page. You can buy from new, you install Supercycle, and then right underneath your buy new option.

You can have it from pre-loved, you can have a rent, you know, rent this for the weekend. You can have a subscribe, Let me pay per week, per month, per quarter for this product and I'll stop paying that when I return the product. And then we have a membership option, which is essentially, I can subscribe to a plan that gives me access to three items.

Let's say Lego, for example. Like if I love building Lego, I don't really want to keep rebuilding the same Lego sets. I don't wanna buy a Lego set for 300 pounds, build it and then keep making the same one. What I want to do is subscribe for 30 pounds a month, have two Lego sets arrive, build them. Once I finish building them, dismantle them, send them back, swap them for two new Lego sets, like keep giving me new things to play with. So membership is this. You subscribe to a plan and then you can, sort of, revolve the items within the plan. So on the front end, it's single product page, single checkout, single customer login.

It's your sales and your circular in one platform. And then from the back office perspective, again, we're inside the Shopify Admin. So you process orders from Shopify orders. All your analytics run via Shopify analytics. It's for all intents and purposes, imagine Shopify added the ability to do rent, subscription and membership.

We kind of have a bit of a saying in the company, we, as much as possible, make it feel like Shopify now natively, which it does because Supercycle, support circular business models.

Barry O'Kane: So that's allowing Supercycle to, sort of, build upon the incredible power of Shopify, particularly for the customer interaction and being able to offer the circular as you said, maybe can turn that 1% conversion into “Well there's also these other things, and we can bring in some new clients into new customers,” and so on. But just to put that into context of “Okay, I'm a retailer or a brand and I'm using Shopify and I want to offer these circular business models.” From your ideal point of view, what would you describe as the, sort of, perfect tech stack? Okay, we've got Shopify, it covers this chunk of that and that need. What are the other things that you think might be needed in that to be able to completely offer that service?

Ryan Atkins: I think it's all of the rest of the operations of a e-commerce business. So, you know, someone needs to receive the order, go and find what shelf that's on in the warehouse, pick it up, put it in a box, send it out to the customer. Now, that in itself is a lot more complicated than it sounds when you have multiple different shipping locations, different inventory in, different inventory out.

So we have an approach at Supercycle of providing three paths. So some merchants, typically when they're a bit smaller, they can basically do all their kind of back office operations just from the Supercycle interface, just from processing orders in Shopify, creating the shipping labels there and, kind of, doing their pick and pack from there.

As you scale up, typically, merchants want to outsource this. They want to partner with a company that has a huge warehouse that looks after many, many brands and does all of their pick and pack and operations for them. Now, that becomes a little bit more complicated because a lot of their businesses aren't set up to receive the product, clean it, inspect it, grade it, you know, all those kind of additional circular requirements. Now there are some that excel at that, so people like ACS in Glasgow or [inaudible] .And a number of 3PLs are kind of leaning into circular. So we've seen some really impressive stuff from people like Bleckmann, DHL supply chains, doing some really interesting things there, GXO.

And what we're increasingly now seeing is those 3PLs can often provide the services, but they're not necessarily connected to something that can then happen on the front end. If you tell me, “Here's an item, can you repair it and get it back to a saleable condition, but maybe not a saleable from new condition?” Yes, they can do that bit, but how that then talks to and integrates with something a customer might see or be able to purchase and arrive with them? That bit's quite disconnected and we're definitely trying to solve that gap. 

So what we want to do when we go to merchants is to say, Look, you can do the fulfillment operations yourself. You can send your stock to one of our specialist circular first 3PLs. Someone like ACS, someone like [inaudable], someone like Maven in the US . You're with a GXO, you're with a DHL supply chain. They can provide the operations, but there's some integration required. And we have a really kind of comprehensive integration platform that allows us to then integrate into their existing 3PLs.

So logistics is definitely one part. I would like to say the technology component of that is mostly solved, and actually a lot of the, kind of, relationship and partnership stuff we've now, kind of, resolved. So mostly all you need to do is say yes in most scenarios.

Another part is accounting. Now, this comes a little bit later on when you're selling not new inventory there's a big advantage to keeping that inventory on your balance sheet. Because if you own the item, when the revenue happens, it stays as an asset on your balance sheet. And if it's an asset on your balance sheet, you can start to do things like depreciating the asset over time. And actually the benefit of keeping it on your balance sheet is you can almost get an additional 20, 30% of value from the item by depreciating the asset. Now, sometimes you need to reset that depreciation if you then resell the item for more than what you depreciated that asset down to.

But again, that starts to get complicated just on the logic of how you do that. But then certainly how you get what those prices are over to NetSuite. And then from NetSuite over to HMRC. Again this is really relying on that kind of really sophisticated and connected integration layer that we have. Now, these are all things that are very difficult to do when you have low volume. And I would say a lot of circular vendors struggle with a scale of opportunity to justify all of this hard, complicated integration work to be done. Again, you work on the Shopify ecosystem, that problem's been solved. So you're adding 5% on top of an ecosystem of integrations and setup, which is already done - it's a marginal deviation. 

It's everything you've done there just with the extra concept of the state of the item and, you know, serialisation for that specific item. It's a small deviation. So logistics, accounting, I think the other thing is there might be multiple customer touch points for the same item, customers purchase an item, and then want to trade that product back in. 

Now, if they buy it and trade it in, that's essentially turning a purchase, from a purchase into a rental, essentially they've incurred a cost to have an item for the period of time that is useful to them. Or they might rent an item, fall in love with it, and then decide they want to keep it. In which case you're converting a rental to a purchase. You have to find that in subscription. People might subscribe to an item, decide they want to keep it, and then change the original transaction model to a new model. 

Now that sounds like a support nightmare. And that sounds like lots of “Oh, I need to cancel that, recreate this, create a spreadsheet, track what happened here.” It certainly used to be incredibly painful. We've come into this with the mindset of, I don't really love the words rental or resale. They're all kind of the same thing for me. They're all just cycles of a product. And then the money might happen at different points on that cycle, but there's an inbound leg, there's an outbound leg, there's an inbound leg, there's an outbound leg, and where the money happens in the cycle is really what defines it, whether that's clusters of resale or clusters of rental or clusters of products as-a-service. But it's all just the products coming in, coming out and payments happening at various different points along the circle. So we try to build it in a way which provides the full flexibility.

And yes, we'll make an off the shelf rental and off the shelf resale and off the shelf products as-a-service. We'll package that up. But we've certainly architected the platform to skate to where the puck's going, and have an understanding of these cycles of a product rather than specifically rental, resale, products of service.

Tandi Tuakli: And how important do you think it is, when you're working with clients in terms of them having a successful rental program, how important it is for them to also be offering then trade-in or re-commerce, in terms of, as you said, being able to scale the rental and being able to see success in that area?

Ryan Atkins: I think it really depends. So if you are a circular first business, let's say you are in skiwear, people only really ski for, you know, let's say two weeks, maybe a month, maybe six weeks. They're certainly not skiing all year, all year round. So in that situation, you're selling lots of time and it's really about, kind of, maximising the utilisation across that asset. If you're a manufacturer, then really what you care about is the lifetime value of a customer.

And you don't mind so much what the makeup of that revenue is. If, you know, 30% of the revenue is from resale, some from products as-a-service, and some from purchasing, from new. But if you're a rental customer your margin on the asset is probably a higher priority than your lifetime value of the customer, for example.

So it just depends on your business model as to how the KPI stack. And I think it really depends on the category you are in, whether you are the ones that manufactured the product or not, and what other levers you have for monetising that customer beyond selling new or just rental, can you make money from doing both? And how do those two things interact with each other?

Tandi Tuakli: What kind of data would you say then that people maybe would get from their rental program that they could maybe leverage in other areas of the business? What kind of insights are they getting from Supercycle that you guys have found are helpful for brands when they are doing a rental program that maybe they gain new insights about new kinds of customers, or new kinds of shopping habits as well?

Ryan Atkins: The more customers you sell to, the more feedback you get. Obviously there's lots of metadata, I guess you're capturing along the time around durability of the product, preferred styles, et cetera, et cetera. I think the main thing that merchants want to understand, and it's really the only question that any merchant has, which is, is this going to cannibalize my “from new” sales? And everything starts with answering that question. And then you work out what additional benefits can I also happen to gain from this.

So answering the question, does it cannibalize? And if it does cannibalize, am I okay with that? That's kind of the core of the questioning framework. Now that happens, we see a few different things. If we just talk about the UK market, about one in five people in the UK admit to warderobing, buying something, wearing it, and then sending it back.

Now that customer habit of, I just want something for a bit or I just want something for that event, exists. Wardrobing is renting. It's just not paying for it. So the consumer or the customer demand to have something and send it back, has existed. It's been the, kind of, the blight of merchants for a long time.

So we see a couple of things when it comes to the metrics. Let me rewind a little bit. Does it cannibalise from your new sales? Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. Depending on the product, and it depends on the headspace. So with Peloton, for example, what we see is it's just going to be additional conversions that might not have happened before. If you go onto a page and you're faced with a 2000 pound purchase, there's a number of people that go, yes I'll commit. I'm confident enough that a Peloton is the right thing for me. It's something I wanna do. It's something I'm definitely gonna use and I'm willing to commit to buying that right now. I would say that those conversions would've happened and were happening anyway because they've always had the ability to purchase from new.

If you introduce a certified refurbished option, the people that really don't care about, the “box fresh smell”, I wouldn't mind saving a few hundred pounds and before they would've just definitely converted on third party marketplaces - on eBay, on Facebook marketplace or somewhere like that.

And it might be that pre-loved or refurbished as Peloton call it, is more expensive on their own website. But is it worth the extra couple of hundred dollars to have it from the brand? Know, it's been refurbished. Know, it comes with the support. It comes with a warranty. Yes. I think it is worth that.

So they've captured some additional revenue that would've happened offsite. Now, some of the customers that would've bought from new, have they purchased from refurbished because it's right under there as an option? Probably, yes. So the equation now is: have I converted more overall, even though I've gained new customers that wouldn't have purchased from me, but then I've lost customers that purchased refurbished and not new.And you need to calculate that creation. 

So it does cannibalise your new sales, but then also overall, your revenue and profitable customer is up, or at least in most cases we've seen it is. And obviously you need to run testing and pricing experiments to make sure that is the case and true for you.

But then underneath that, they'll then have a subscribe option. And I think that unlocks a completely new segment of customers, which is the amount of things I've had buyer's remorse over, and I've just not purchased at all because of that buyer's remorse. Or the fear of that buyer's remorse, should I say.

So I like the idea of Peloton. But is it just gonna be another thing I buy and sits in the corner and I might be really passionate about it for two months and then it might just sit there and I'm really gonna kick myself? I've spent all this money and don't end up using it. If I can pay for it monthly, commit to three or four months and if I really love it, it's a long time before it would've been more cost effective to purchase it from new. But, I've taken the plunge because my risk is now so much lower. The risk of buyer's remorse has disappeared and I think there’s a good 30, 40% of people that are hitting that product page that don't buy because of this fear of buyer's remorse. And I think that subscription option takes that fear away. 

So the data and really the only data that merchants care about, at least ones I'm speaking to, really care about are, “Talk to me about how this impacts my P&L.” Does it cannibalise? And if it does cannibalise, if I do this thing, am I up or am I down? And there's some complicated maths to figure that out. But we do a lot of the heavy lifting on answering those questions and have design programs where you pilot it on X number of products.

You maybe just start with resale, then you factor in a rental program, then we broaden it out to the category, then it's available on every single product page. And you kind of do a phase rollout approach to validate that the promise of Supercycle, which is you can continue to grow your business and you can start to reduce your need for new manufacturing at the same time and close that gap on capitalism and environmentalism.

It's a lofty goal, but it needs to be compatible with the commercials of the business and you wanna take a phased approach to make sure that happens. 

Separate to that, there's lots of nice additional information. If you rent a product to a customer, there's much more chance that you can get feedback from them because they need to come back to say they're returning the product.

So there's lots more opportunities to ask customers questions about the product and you're much more likely to get that kind of qualitative feedback. Because it's a more active customer that's trying new products from you on a more consistent basis, they’re more open to giving you feedback.

So there's loads of additional benefits and nice-to-haves.

Barry O'Kane: I really like the way that you've presented that as this story with Peloton, and I was just about to say is this viable or could this be viable that business can then start to explore some of those secondary benefits?

Like you say, the feedback that can maybe feed into product design or the additional things, subscription comes with a repair or additional things and leading into customer loyalty, even things like the refurbished option, can I do a higher margin there, can I get a repair cost lower? But all of that, the sort of promise of circularity, you can only really get to that depth of conversation if you're able to say, “Well, I could get that far by launching or getting a pilot or I can see a path to getting those things.” 

So from what you're seeing, and use Peloton there as an example because it's a relatively expensive product, are you seeing where types of products or sectors or spaces where there's a kind of, This is downhill, it's a calculation to make it easier to roll out pilots or other places where maybe the challenges are higher? And so as Supercycle you might go, “Okay, well that's not an area we can focus yet?”

Ryan Atkins: I'm broadly a believer that any business that has non-consumable products has a circular model which can be a meaningful profitability driver for them. Now, that model might need to change. I'm not saying every business should do rental. I'm not saying they should all do resale. I'm not saying they should all do membership, but if you are a lower cost fashion brand, for example, depending on your range of products, if you might give your products to a circular first business that can bring customers for them. 

So if you are an ASOS and you have lots of not new products, give those products to Hirestreet, and Isabella will do an incredible job of turning that stock into revenue for them and also share that with the brand. If you are an expensive piece of equipment, I would say products as-a-service probably makes sense. If you're selling expensive prams, babies only stay baby sized for quite a short period of time. I don't really need to own a pram. It's a very fleeting moment, really in my life. Let me just pay monthly for the pram until my baby can no longer fit in the pram, let me send it back. You know, it comes back to you, you clean it, put new wheels on it, and then it goes out as new, to the next customer. Certainly better for my personal cash flow. And it's significantly better for the merchant from a margin and longevity perspective. 

If you are higher end fashion, then short term rentals probably make a lot of sense. If you're a fashion designer, I feel like we went through a big phase and I'm probably really not the person to be speaking about this because, you know, I often turn up in a branded sweatshirt and a pair of New Balance trainers. I'm not exactly a fashionphile. But we worked with a lot of businesses and the big trend was towards things that can easily be part of multiple outfits. It's like, almost how can we make products quite neutral, almost bland, but make them very swappable and you create different outfits from these same kinds of core pieces.

And really what you're trying to say there is like, How can I look different? Without needing to own loads of different things. I feel like it was almost the death of statement pieces and expression in fashion. And if you do have a big statement piece and you really are trying to express yourself with fashion, you probably don't want to keep turning up to different events in the same statement piece. 

So I actually think rental introduces a way of, Allow me to experiment much more with fashion, allow me to get these slightly more expressive, statement pieces. But let me swap them out, let me pay for them for the period of time that they're interesting and valuable and for that event.

And we're trying to make it as easy as possible for customers to get the product and send it back again. You know, sending it back needs to be as easy as receiving it. So I'm a believer that every single non-consumable business, there is a flavor of circular, which can be meaningful for you. But I would certainly not prescribe a single method or a single way of doing it.

Tandi Tuakli: And do you think that's something that brands need to understand before they maybe get into looking at the technology? Say, rental program. Do you think they need to understand the business model first or can you start and then maybe, I guess pivot to see which business model is better for you?

Ryan Atkins: I think it's the same as anything. If you are starting a business, the thing you launch on day one is not what it looks like on day 365. Just start the journey. Start the journey, iterate, improve, evolve. You know, you're not telling me that you sketch down a product and the product you've sketched down is the final form on day one. I think a lot of merchants are waiting for, I just want a playbook, that I've seen work for a brand that looks exactly like me and I want to copy and paste it. And I've seen this particularly be true for fashion.

They are evolving, they are coming. I think we are close to kind of repeatable playbooks where Okay, if you do these things, in this order and this, sort of messaging to customers, at this price point, at this percentage of RRP, broadly these things work and we can guide the people through those.

Essentially our platform is a playbook and it's near a one size fits all. We've deliberately tried to build to allow an awful lot of flexibility, both in the business model, but also how that business model is then represented to customers.

We give a lot of flexibility around how it's integrated in your store and is it part of your loyalty program. Do different loyalty tiers get different ability, you know, quicker shipments or free returns or if you convert a resale to a rental.

We try to make both the business model and the customer experience as customisable as possible. I would love the merchants to be a little bit braver to maybe take the template playbook, but have a mission to find a way which is uniquely them in the same way that they do with their products and in the same way they do with their marketing, in the same way they do with their positioning.

They're all striving to be uniquely them. That should be true for their circular program too.

Barry O'Kane: I'm a bit conscious of time so there's a couple other things I'd want to cover before we finish up. One other area I'm interested in, Ryan, is your view on partnerships, which I know is so important for Supercycle.

And you talked a little bit about that when we talked about the tech stack. And you and I have collaborated on a couple of projects with rental businesses. So I'm interested, I guess, broadly on your view or your approach to those partnerships and if you have any strong feelings about how those can enable circular success for Supercycle and for your clients and broadly?

Ryan Atkins: Yeah, so I think partnerships is the most crucial bit. And the way that I see partnerships really is kind of building on that previous point, which is if brands are going to be uniquely them, each of them are going to have increasingly unique integration requirements for how their back office works. They're gonna have increasingly unique requirements for how the proposition wants to look on the customer experience. They're gonna want to have increasingly unique experiences with what happens in circular impacts loyalty or their email marketing workflows or their remarketing campaigns, et cetera.

So the reality of us here, if we are trying to support every single one of those use cases and provide that breadth of flexibility, I think it's a non-starter. What we want to provide is best practice as drag and drop as possible, and you can get live in an afternoon with something which is pretty solid, with a reasonable amount of, you know, tweak it yourself from a wysiwyg as possible. We do a fairly good job of that, and we'll increasingly do that, but it's really important for us that we make the complex and the unique possible.

But we certainly don't want to be a professional services business. And there's incredible partners, yourself included, on kind of building out those really unique back office processes because receiving a pram and working out what checks you need to do against it and how you authenticate it, each of these processes are gonna be very unique to each businesses.

And they might be running different hardware and different RFID tags and yes, we'll provide a set of tools, but I want to be able to continue on the journey with them as they iterate their way to scale. 

Partners is the way a merchant says I want to do this. And partners is the way that you can say yes to basically anything that they ask for. 

We shouldn't be in a position where a merchant wants to further invest, further integrate, further personalise their circular proposition, and they be hit with no, that can't be done. That's not how we move forward. That's not how we innovate. And I want to provide the tooling. I want to provide the pipes, the Stripe, the Shopify. But how that blunt tool is then used to create something that's an incredible customer experience, something that really works for the merchant, I really wanna hand over to partners. Like yourself.

Barry O'Kane: And that's a conversation I'd love to explore further as well. Because one of the things that you hear often, and I think it's a hundred percent true, is circularity in the broadest sense relies on collaboration. Between so-called competitors but even more crucially between the enablers, those of us who are hoping to help circularity, that original vision you described at the start of moving away from the sharp edges and actually reach those ambitions that we set out when we talk about a broader circular economy. 

Thank you very much again, and just finally to finish off for those who want to learn a little bit more about Supercycle or get in touch with you, what do they do?

Ryan Atkins: I'm fairly active on LinkedIn, Ryan Atkins at Supercycle or supercycle.com.

Barry O'Kane: Thanks again. Thanks so much for joining us.

Ryan Atkins: Thank you.