If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve used many of Unilever’s products over your lifetime. In fact, you’ve probably got at least a few of them living in your bathroom, pantry, or fridge at this very moment. Founded in 1929 through the merger of a British soap maker and a Dutch margarine company, this London-based multinational corporation has stayed true to its roots producing mostly personal care products and packaged foods—and as of 2024, it’s grown into a $116 billion business that sells its brands in nearly every country in the world.
With two to three billion people using these products every day, Unilever’s market penetration and profitability are beyond question. But such enormous and consistent production can be something of a double-edged sword—there are, of course, social and environmental impacts to running an operation at such a scale. This is why Unilever has committed itself to one of the most ambitious corporate ERG initiatives the business world has seen. Indeed, if any organization is in a position to “make sustainable living commonplace”—their self-stated goal—it’s Unilever.
While this is an immense effort involving an extensive multi-pronged strategy that depends on countless executives, employees, partners, services, and tools, this piece will focus specifically on the problem of consumer waste and how Unilever is tackling this problem with B-Stock as a key partner.
A Universal Problem
The pillars of the Unilever Compass, as they’re now calling this sweeping initiative, include acting against climate change, protecting and regenerating nature, and building a waste-free world. Within that third pillar, there are two opportunities to reduce waste: (1) preventing the generation of waste and (2) ensuring the outflow of all excess inventory.
Despite high-efficiency production and best-in-class demand forecasting, Unilever recognized an unfortunate reality: a portion of produced goods will always go unsold. After examining both the environmental impact and business implications of these unsold goods, Unilever understood that effective and innovative channels for reselling this inventory would be crucial to their overall effort.
Where Legacy Processes Fall Short
In the past, when Unilever needed to move out surplus inventory, it would reach out to initiate negotiations through several independent inventory reduction channels—a collection of liquidators, wholesalers, and brokers that trade in surplus inventory. While such services may have worked previously, modern global-minded enterprises should seek more sophisticated alternatives, especially given the handful of crucial shortcomings of these traditional approaches.
First, old-school liquidation partners may offer just pennies on the dollar for surplus with little room for negotiation. And once the inventory is sold off to these buyers, it can change hands many times before reaching the end consumer. At each exchange, the new owner takes their cut of the inventory value—value that should ideally be working for the original brand or retailer.
Second, it’s difficult for brands and retailers to predict where their surplus inventory will end up when selling to traditional resellers. When brand reputation is important, a company would be better off selling the surplus directly to a vetted and qualified business buyer who will pass them directly on to end consumers.
Last, and most important, is the matter of scale and efficiency. While there’s certainly no shortage of liquidators and brokers waiting to take on slow-moving inventory, brands should be wary of engaging with too many of them. While it sounds counterintuitive, the more resale channels a business uses, the more time and resources it must spend to manage those relationships through manual methods such as phone calls, emails, and shared spreadsheets.
Maintaining just a few select liquidation partners comes with a downside too: managing fewer channels—while a lighter lift in terms of man-hours—means that one’s whole recommerce strategy hinges on just a few points of failure. If, for whatever reason, a resale partner moves, closes its doors, or simply cannot buy as much volume as expected, then a brand or retailer may be left scrambling to move out surplus inventory quickly before their warehouse space is at a premium.
Now that the business-oriented problems are laid out clearly, how exactly does sustainability factor in?
The pessimists of the world might consider financial success and sustainability to be at odds with each other, if not totally mutually exclusive. While this is an unimaginative perspective (and an untrue one, as we’ll see shortly), a member of this group might pose an interesting question: If the common, traditional recommerce methods are so inefficient, why bother at all? Without a scalable, easy-to-use method for clearing out unsold inventory, leaders are disinclined to make a bona fide effort to improve sustainability, opting instead to incinerate their slow-moving goods or dump in a landfill. But if a proven solution existed that could help brands and retailers achieve both goals, the cynics might change their tune.
Fortunately, Unilever found one such solution—one that addressed all the issues above, proving itself to be a superior option for both business and sustainability.
The Benefits of B-Stock for Business and Beyond
In 2019, Unilever reached out to B-Stock Solutions, the world’s largest B2B recommerce marketplace for returned and excess goods, for help. B-Stock has spent nearly two decades connecting the world’s leading brands and retailers directly to a vast global network of trusted business buyers who compete to purchase high-quality surplus inventory which they, in turn, rely on to stock the shelves of their own businesses. Unilever quickly came to understand the enormous value of this approach and decided to partner with B-Stock. Instead of soliciting and comparing many offers through multiple rounds of phone calls and emails, Unilever’s online marketplace centralizes resale efforts under one managed auction model—and it made all the difference.
One executive leader at Unilever broke down the partnership’s strengths into five key areas:
- Cost of Goods (CoG) Recovery
B-Stock’s list-and-bid sales model encourages many potential buyers to compete among themselves, naturally extracting the highest willingness to pay. While tax write offs and donations had been bringing in 0-20% CoG recovery, Unilever found that B-Stock was securing them 55-200% CoG recovery—an undeniable improvement.
- Convenience & Efficiency
For every auction that the company holds on the B-Stock platform, either the buyer or a third-party shipper picks up the lot from a Unilever warehouse and brings it to its destination. This has eliminated the need for Unilever to manage transporting surplus goods itself. Cutting out this step saved both time and critical logistics resources that could then be put toward moving around newer, more profitable inventory.
- Reach & Demand
Instead of relying on just a few liquidation partners, Unilever gained hundreds of new, relevant, and qualified—but previously unknown—buyers through B-Stock’s global network. Furthermore, B-Stock expanded Unilever’s buyer base to include both large, influential players as well as smaller ones with more modest buying power. Under the traditional liquidation model, managing relationships with such buyers wouldn’t be worth Unilever’s time, but using the B-Stock marketplace, it’s just as easy to sell to thousands of buyers as it is to sell to one.
- Speed at Scale
Holding multi-user auctions on a single, centralized platform enabled quicker, more efficient outflow of goods. Between high buyer demand and assistance from B-Stock’s recommerce experts, the solution also scales up easily. In a single week, Unilever has sold over 35,000 consumer units through 8 separate auctions, resulting in a turnover of over €8,000, although B-Stock could easily increase or decrease resale cadence as needed.
- Sustainability
Selling excess inventory to business buyers helps these goods find new life in the hands of consumers rather than simply taking up space in a warehouse—or worse—filling up landfills, leaching into waterways, or poisoning the air as incinerator fumes. From an environmental point of view, re-homing these goods is a vastly preferable outcome.
Driving Positive Outcomes
While Unilever openly acknowledges that B-Stock was a natural fit for its priorities, B-Stock still maintains highly granular performance records to allow for continuous analysis and data-backed program optimization over years of partnership. We like to let these numbers speak for themselves.
From the launch of the program in 2019 through 2024, B-Stock has expanded Unilever’s base of business buyers from just a small handful of liquidators to nearly 1,000 unique bidders and more than 230 unique buyers across over 30 nations in Europe and North America. Moreover, about 4 out of 5 of those auctions were won by loyal, repeat buyers. But while these numbers bode well for business, it’s the sustainability impact of this partnership that’s truly impressive.
Over the last five years, B-Stock has hosted over 3,000 auctions for Unilever, with the total number of individual units sold topping 10 million, many of which would have been destined to end their lives unused, destroyed or buried in a landfill. If these numbers are hard to conceptualize, consider the total weight of goods sold – about 20 million pounds – which is roughly the same as the 984-foot wrought iron Eiffel Tower in Paris, France.
Is Demand for Surplus Here to Stay?
While Unilever’s results certainly make a strong case for partnering with B-Stock, brands and retailers from across our network are benefiting from both record-high demand for sustainable business practices and interest in the circular economy.
An internal survey revealed that 75% of B-Stock’s buyers consider sustainability to be very important or extremely important to them, indicating that initiatives like Unilever’s do matter in this industry. Furthermore, 65% of buyers surveyed responded that shopping sustainably is either very important or extremely important to their own customers. Finally, over 90 percent of B-Stock buyers find it important to work with companies that value sustainability in their business practices.
While business buyers track countless metrics and work around the clock to run their own stores, it’s clear that they do have sustainability on their minds when they're sourcing and acquiring inventory for their businesses. And these numbers represent just one client. For good measure, consider that across the entire B-Stock marketplace, we’ve facilitated the sale of 144 million units since our inception—that’s over 488 million pounds of consumer goods given a second chance at life in the hands of end consumers around the world.
The fact that forward-thinking companies are enabling sustainable practices without sacrificing positive business outcomes points to a bright future for both our own network of buyers and sellers and for the worldwide circular economy.
Tapping the Secondary Market for a Sustainable Future
As consumers and corporate leaders around the globe wake up to the reality that our buying and selling habits really do matter, more businesses will follow in the footsteps of Unilever and begin laying out lofty plans for a more sustainable future. Part of this progression is the inevitable realization that profit and responsible practices are not mutually exclusive, as B-Stock demonstrates every day.
The worldwide secondary market for consumer goods is growing and thriving, so why not take full advantage? Through unmatched buyer demand, deep data insights, and a suite of smart tools and services, we’ll help your organization maximize recovery on surplus merchandise—regardless of category, condition, or quantity—all while reaching new heights of operational efficiency. And because there’s no longer a need to choose between increasing your bottom line and preserving the planet for future generations, B-Stock is one solution you definitely can’t afford to sleep on.
Want more information? Visit our website to learn more about how B-Stock can help your business and advance your resale strategy.
Ready to see the B-Stock platform in action? Reach out and schedule a demo today.