Accessories brand Poplar Goods operates lean—two founders, one part-time ops hire. When returns started climbing 18% quarter-over-quarter, they needed insights fast. "We're not a Fortune 500 with a logistics team. We needed to understand our returns with whatever time we had," said co-founder Derek Okafor.
ReturnSense integrated in under an hour. Within two weeks, the AI surfaced a pattern: specific metal finish batches were triggering "arrived damaged" returns at 3x the rate of other SKUs. The cause was a plating supplier change that hadn't been communicated.
Poplar Goods pivoted back to their original supplier within 30 days. "We'd have kept selling damaged product for months without this visibility. This isn't just about cost—it's about protecting our reputation with customers who trusted us," Okafor noted.
The brand now runs weekly return analysis as part of their Monday operations meeting, using ReturnSense data to guide every new product introduction decision.