Worker Highlight: 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  Top 50 Women Leaders of San Francisco for 2023 by Ladies We Admire!

Emel is an completed 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 crew liable for product growth, income progress, person expertise, analytics, and company and product technique.

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

Q: Are you able to inform us a little bit 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 have 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 individuals. The second factor happening was, we’d simply gotten a home and I used to be procuring loads, and shopping for furnishings—and sadly, I used to be returning a few of it. Because of the excessive price, in the event you pay full worth and assume the merchandise could also be broken, as an finish person, you need to return it. You need to be sure that if you’re paying full worth, you’re getting the best high quality potential. 

As she went via the method of returning a desk she’d ordered that arrived with a dent on it, her mother and father—who have been visiting—have been amazed by the versatile return insurance policies, which aren’t outstanding in Emel’s native Turkey: “If you wish to return one thing there, you actually should struggle. Even when it’s faulty, you might not get your a reimbursement. The client shouldn’t be all the time proper.” 

This obtained Emel pondering: 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 technique to cross these returned gadgets on to secondary finish customers and generate financial savings? The reply she got here up with was: via “second life givers;” Emel’s time period for consumers. And simply as she contemplated these potentialities, B-Inventory reached out, as if via serendipity.

“I do know there are a lot of conventional  liquidation channels, however this trade 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 pondering that I can truly not solely assist individuals, however assist Earth by giving these merchandise a second, third, fourth life. That actually 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 are able to construct. The alternatives that we are able to create for resellers and for fixing inefficiencies, and the ache factors that we are able to clear up for retailers is limitless. As I inform my very own crew, sky’s the restrict. We simply have to focus and construct it proper.”

Emel’s imaginative and prescient for B-Inventory goes past promoting overstock to vetted consumers—it means that we are able to change into a serious participant within the gig financial system, fostering the way forward for consumers and serving to them not solely develop, however be taught alongside the best way:

Q: How do you envision B-Inventory enabling individuals 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 houses. 

The variety of second life givers is just restricted by the variety of adults within the inhabitants, and also you don’t even should personal a automotive to begin your aspect hustle! For this reason I imagine the sky’s the restrict: we are able to prolong our platform in a means that we can assist second life givers begin their enterprise in the event that they don’t know the way to begin; assist them create their very own web site, receive a enterprise license, or present schooling: Enterprise 101. We are going to stroll with them, aspect by aspect from the start. We are going to assist them construct, handle, and develop their enterprise in order that increasingly individuals can do that job and assist us convey extra merchandise into life.

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

On the vendor aspect, we want to consider how we are able to 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 will we clear up different issues for them via scanning, lotting, and sorting?”

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

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

After I see these two issues occurring, I’ll say we made it: we created a platform to avoid wasting Earth. And that’s what I’ll attempt 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 need to construct helpful merchandise which might be simple to make use of and modern. These are my three standards:

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