Replenium: The Moonshot to Revolutionize Ecommerce

Written by Brett Gardner

Astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”

Following Sagan’s wisdom, in order to understand the full depth and breadth of Replenium’s impact (and potential impact) on Retailers, the CPG space, and ecommerce markets, we must first start at the very beginning of how Replenium and its solution came to fruition. Tom Furphy, founder and CEO of Replenium, and his cohorts, Justin Leigh, his co-founder and Umair Bashir, CTO of Replenium, originally came up with the concept of auto-replenishment while working at Amazon. They were all involved in launch of Amazon’s CPG businesses at the time – Health & Personal Care, Beauty, Grocery and Amazon Fresh. As this was Amazon’s first dip into the fast-moving consumer goods space, solidifying the foothold within this market was of paramount importance.

This in turn spawned the idea of “Subscribe and Save,” which in 2020 accounted for approximately $18 Billion in revenue alone for Amazon. Even with its initial success, Tom, Justin and Umair felt that this program had the potential for even greater impact in the ecommerce space by having better customer tools, applying machine learning and then bringing auto-replenishment capabilities to other retailers. With the realization that Amazon was just scratching the surface when it came to auto-replenishment's impact on ecommerce, this left the team with an appetite to ask “what could have been” and pursue “what could be.” This curiosity eventually became manifest and Replenium, the world’s first open Auto-Replenishment platform, was born. The platform, specifically tailored to any retailer looking to better serve their customers and fully optimize their ecommerce economics, is becoming more and more of a necessity in the ecommerce market today.

Now that the etymology of Replenium is better understood, how exactly does the solution optimize any retailer's ecommerce economics? Replenium’s platform: The application of machine learning and intuitive management tools to automate the shopping tasks of routine purchases, generates a higher sales volume, drives additional ecommerce cost support from vendors, and makes operations and logistics far more efficient.

Replenium’s market research has discovered that over 50% of the items in everyday shopping baskets are routine purchases. With auto-replenishment, we aim to set this portion of the basket on cruise-control by fostering automation and machine learning to better serve the customer and their shopping experiences. By setting these items on “cruise-control,” Replenium will create orders on behalf of customers so that customers get exactly the items that they need, precisely when they need them, while simultaneously offering customers an intuitive way to manage their cruise-control items. As customers are greatly benefitting from this level of automation, retailers experience large upticks in customer lifetime value and include “Replenishment Sales” as an additional revenue stream to the top line and more profit to their bottom line, all while providing customers with Replenium’s new personalized type of loyalty.

Retailers can learn more about how Replenium can improve ecommerce economics by calculating their own potential additional auto-replenishment revenue stream. Contact us for a demo and to use our Rp Calculator, which produces quantitative projections based on your specific business metrics.

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Brett Gardner, Senior Sales Engineer, Replenium

Brett played baseball at Dartmouth and had aspirations to play professionally but began a financial career instead as an equity trader where he garnered an incredible amount of knowledge with regards to market. He then pivoted into technology after getting an MS in Computer Science.