Spencer Kieboom’s baseball career ended with the Washington Nationals in 2019. Now, he’s taking lessons from the game and applying it to improve how retailers accept returns from customers.
The 32-year-old Marietta native launched Pollen Returns in 2021 as a return-management platform for retailers, return-to-distribution platforms or refurbishment companies. It uses data for retailers to determine whether a returned product can be resold. This allows companies to increase inventory, revenue and reduce waste, Kieboom said.
“The biggest gap in this market is what's happening in between consumers and the supply chain,” said Kieboom, a graduate of Marietta’s George Walton Comprehensive High School. “Why is that not being touched when today's markets have developed so much? As consumers we expect the latest and greatest as frequently as possible.”
Pollen sells its service directly to retailers and has no overhead costs such as warehouses or drivers, which Kieboom says makes it different from competitors such as Returnmates and ReturnQueen.
The company raised $1.5 million from an angel investor so far and plans to raise $5 million total, Kieboom said. Those funds will be used to grow its technical team to develop photo recognition, artificial intelligence software, along with managing its systems. Once Pollen completes its seed round, Kieboom said he will build out a sales team.
The company’s office is located at the Lenox Center Building at 3355 Lenox Road NE. Its team currently consists of four full-time employees and two part-time workers. His three co-founders are veterans in supply chain and technology. They are chief operating officer Mark Hart, chief technology officer Chad Ozgur and chief commercial officer Christian Piller.
Kieboom said his curiosity for logistics came while taking packaging science classes at Clemson University, where he played college baseball. Later, he spent time at Kohl’s, Ace Hardware, UPS and FedEx locations to learn about point-of-sale systems and radio-frequency identification.That was after Kieboom spent time in the big leagues.
He was selected by the Washington Nationals in the 2012 Major League Baseball Draft. In both his minor and major league career, he hit over 200 RBIs, according to Minor League Baseball. In 2019, he decided to retire due to an ear surgery related to hearing loss.
He has returned home to grow his company in a city recognized as a legacy logistics hub. Warehousing and software startup Stord, supply chain innovator Verusen and robotics company GreyOrange are some of Atlanta’s supply chain businesses adding to that reputation.
