REBEL: How Emily Hosie Is Turning Retail Returns Into a Recommerce Business

Emily Hosie spent more than a decade inside the traditional retail machine before she built a company designed to fix one of its biggest blind spots. After studying sociology at Queen’s University in Canada, she worked her way up through department-store retail: a buyer’s assistant and later a trend buyer at Holt Renfrew, a move to New York for a similar buying role, then VP of Product Development at Saks Fifth Avenue and Saks Off 5th, and eventually Divisional VP of Merchandising at TJX Canada, the parent company behind TJX, Marshalls, and HomeSense. That run gave her a front-row seat to how off-price and discount retail actually works at scale — knowledge that would become the backbone of her own company.

The idea for what became REBEL took shape in 2020, while Hosie was pregnant. As she navigated the world of baby gear, she saw firsthand how much brand-new or barely used product — returns, open-box items, overstock — was routinely thrown away rather than resold, largely because retailers lacked an efficient, trustworthy way to grade, price, and re-sell it. She founded the company, originally called Rebelstork, to build exactly that: a marketplace that buys returned and excess baby gear directly from brands and retailers, inspects and grades it, and resells it to parents at a steep discount instead of sending it to a landfill.

In March 2025, the company rebranded from Rebelstork to REBEL, a change that coincided with its expansion beyond baby gear into home goods — kitchen brands like Caraway and small appliances among them. By November 2025, REBEL announced a further expansion into outdoor and sporting goods alongside a new funding round, positioning itself as a broader recommerce platform for open-box and returned merchandise rather than a baby-specific marketplace. The company operates out of a large processing facility in Kannapolis, North Carolina — reported at roughly 300,000 square feet, though at least one outlet has cited a slightly different figure — where it says it sorts, grades, and ships tens of thousands of unique products every week.

Funding has followed the company’s growth. REBEL raised an $18 million Series A in September 2024, led by Maveron with participation from Serena Ventures, Marcy Venture Partners, and Golden Ventures — investors whose backers reportedly include Serena Williams and Jay-Z. In November 2025, the company announced a $25 million Series B led by MarcyPen Capital Partners, an oversubscribed round the company says will fund the outdoor and sporting goods expansion. As with most founder-reported growth figures, REBEL’s other public numbers — 300 percent year-over-year sales growth in its baby category, more than a million products processed, over 2,500 brand and retailer partnerships — come from company press releases and founder interviews rather than audited financial statements, and should be read as the company’s own account of its performance rather than independently verified fact.

What REBEL actually sells is straightforward: open-box, returned, and overstock products from name-brand retailers, offered at discounts the company advertises as up to 70 percent off original retail. The baby category remains the heart of the business — strollers, car seats, cribs, monitors — but the home and outdoor expansions have broadened the catalog to include kitchen appliances, cookware, and sporting goods. REBEL says it uses proprietary technology to grade and price incoming inventory at scale, a necessity given that no two returned products arrive in exactly the same condition. The company is also a certified B-Corporation, a status that ties directly into its core pitch: that reducing landfill waste from retail returns can be a profitable business, not just a values-driven one.

The problem REBEL is chasing is enormous by any measure. U.S. retailers absorbed hundreds of billions of dollars in returned merchandise in recent years — figures in the $850 billion to $890 billion range appear across industry sources, though the exact number varies depending on the year and methodology used. A large share of that returned product, historically, has simply gone to landfill rather than being resold, both because processing and reselling returns at scale is operationally difficult and because many retailers have not built the infrastructure to do it well. That gap is exactly what recommerce platforms like REBEL are trying to close, and it is a big enough problem that REBEL was reportedly brought in to help process returns when Bed Bath & Beyond and its buybuy BABY division filed for bankruptcy — a scale opportunity most three-year-old startups never see.

Hosie has talked about the operational realities behind REBEL’s growth — the unglamorous work of building relationships with brands and retailers willing to hand over their returns pipeline, developing the technology to grade and price thousands of unique items a week, and running a physical facility at real scale rather than a purely digital storefront. On the podcast, she discussed how her retail background at Saks and TJX Canada directly shaped her approach to pricing and merchandising at REBEL, and how the company thinks about the tension between moving inventory quickly and protecting its brand reputation for quality — a balance that matters more in resale than in traditional retail, since every item a customer receives is someone else’s return.

Hosie has also been candid about the limits of founder-reported metrics. Numbers like REBEL’s 300 percent year-over-year sales growth, its million-plus products processed, and its 2,500-plus brand partnerships all come from the company itself rather than independent audits, and some of REBEL’s own marketing materials describe the scale of the returns problem in inconsistent ways — at times citing a roughly $16 billion figure and at other times describing a market worth closer to $1 trillion, depending on what exactly is being measured. That inconsistency is common in a young company’s public messaging, but it is worth flagging for anyone trying to size up REBEL’s actual market opportunity rather than simply repeating the biggest number in a press release.

For a founder who spent a decade inside the traditional retail industry before starting her own company, Hosie’s path is a useful case study in how domain expertise can translate directly into a startup idea. She did not invent a new category from scratch; she took a problem she had seen up close for years — retailers struggling to profitably move returned and excess inventory — and built the infrastructure to solve it better than the incumbents she used to work for. With a fresh Series B, an expansion into home and outdoor goods, and a founder still directly involved in day-to-day operations, REBEL’s next test will be whether it can scale that model across categories as effectively as it has in baby gear.

Listen to the full conversation with Emily Hosie on Apple Podcasts.