Rebelstork rebrands to Rebel as it expands into home and seeks a larger share of the resale pie

The launch comes as Rebel has seen 300% sales growth year over year focusing on baby alone. As such, Rebel thinks now is the right time to expand into new categories. The company raised an $18 million Series A in September 2024 to help fuel its expansion. It currently works with around 2,500 brands and retailers to process returns, including mass retailers like Target. 

“We’ve built the technology to be able to handle any vertical’s returns and re-commerce at scale,” founder Emily Hosie told Modern Retail. “And that makes us very unique but also the solution for those with a need or want to divert product from landfill.”  

Some of the new home categories span kitchen, decor, bathroom and storage, with brands like Caraway, Oxo and Breville. New listings include items like a 10-piece All-Clad cookware set for $519, which is 35% off the retail price, and a Costway air purifier for $79, at 45% off retail. 

The rebrand to Rebel and a focus on new categories is also a sign of big changes in the recommerce and resale industry. eMarketer predicted that the U.S. resale market would hit $83.75 billion last year and about $91.6 billion by 2027. But those figures could swell if companies like Rebel end up benefiting from a more price-conscious consumer who is looking to score deals. Consumer confidence dropped in February, according to insight trackers at The Conference Board, and people are becoming less optimistic about their household financial pictures.  

Amar Singh, analyst with Kantar, said recommerce is quickly becoming popular for shoppers, especially thanks to online marketplaces and peer-to-peer transactions.

He anticipates more growth in the future as shoppers become accustomed to shopping around for lower prices. Others, he said, enjoy buying from resale sites because of the “treasure hunt” of finding something unique at a good price — that’s not unlike the pull to off-price retailers like TJ Maxx or Burlington. 

“Shoppers are going to find deals everywhere,” he said. “Value, lower price points and treasure hunts are a perfect combination in the current macroeconomic landscape.”

Because it processes returns, Rebel’s inventory naturally leans toward what’s a popular trending buy.  Rebel soft-launched home essentials during Black Friday-Cyber Monday before officially rebranding and relaunching its e-commerce site this year. Not only were existing shoppers adding home items to their carts alongside baby gear, but Rebel found it was able to acquire other shoppers who were looking for deals on high-ticket purchases like espresso machines. In some cases, Rebel became the last spot in e-commerce to find popular items. “We had the Ninja Slushi machines during peak holiday,” Hosie said. “They were sold out at full price, but we had them open box at a value. So you’r dealing with cases like that in the returns vertical.” 

Behind the scenes, Rebel has envisioned growing beyond baby for some time. But the timing of the decision stemmed from demand from the brands, said Jeff Stein, vp of strategy and business operations. These partners sell their returns to Rebel and ship to its Charlotte, North Carolina warehouse — or, in some cases, customers send the returns to Rebel directly. The partnership gives brands a way to get the revenue out of what’s so often a drain. Rebel estimates brands and retailers lose a collective $1 trillion annually due to inefficiencies and complexities in returns. There’s around $300 million in returned products each year in the home and baby category alone.

“The expansion was driven by our ongoing conversations with our brand partners, our retail partners,” Stein said. “They look to us as a trusted returns solution, and they’re the ones who expressed a need for support beyond the baby space.”

For brands, it’s also a potential new acquisition tool — Rebel’s statistics show that about 70% of customers interact with a brand for the first time on its website. “It helps them learn what’s out there and explore the different brands,” Stein said.

Looking ahead, Rebel will be looking to reach new customers who haven’t interacted with it as a baby-focused marketplace. But from a brand campaign standpoint, much of the company’s’ messaging will be the same, Hosie said. Its paid social ads often focus on the realities of overflowing landfills and explain how items that are returned are rarely resold and often wind up in the waste stream. It brings the size of the crisis to life with images of Rebel’s 300,000-square-foot warehouse — roughly the size of three Costcos — full of boxed-up returns. 

“The average consumer does not realize that when they purchase something and return it that there’s a very high likelihood it is not going back on shelves. And I think the education of that is been an important message for us,” Hosie said. 

Last year, the company diverted about 12 million pounds of products out of landfills and into customers’ homes. Hosie said the company aims to hit 25 million pounds as it expands, as she sees the technology the company has built as something that can be applied to other products. 

“We are growing up and we’re expanding, and this allows us to tackle the entire returns-e-commerce crisis versus just [focusing on] a singular vertical,” Hosie said.