Hey everyone 👋

We’re Alejandro and Ilya, cofounders at Return Signals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb90UYmDDEM\

Over $1T in apparel, footwear, and accessories is sold online. $300B of that gets returned. We believe many of these returns are driven by a poor post-purchase customer experience.

This is why we are building an AI-powered luxury concierge that lets brands proactively check in with customers via SMS when their items are delivered.

This high-touch experience drives 5–10% absolute margin uplift while improving CSAT and LTV.

We intelligently recommend appropriate exchanges when customers are unsatisfied. Our texts achieve very high response rates (over 80% of eventual returns), and convert 70% of return intents into exchanges. All this without increasing the combined exchange and return rate.

Because exchanges preserve revenue, our customers retain most of the original sale value.

We achieve over 95% positive sentiment in our interactions (and almost no negative interactions), with many customers spending multiple messages thanking our bot and developing a personal relationship 🙂

On the backend, we offer comprehensive analytics, including agentic search, which lets brands ask any question and have our AI read through thousands of conversations to find the right answer.

Our backstory

Alejandro’s family ran two apparel brands in the US (200+ brick-and-mortar stores) that also sell online. Through this, we discovered two things:

1. The post-purchase customer experience is broken: brands rarely check in proactively after delivery, which often leads to poor customer experiences, churn, or refunds. Most communication is limited to order tracking, upsells (“get 25% off”), or review requests. There is rarely a true high-touch experience.
2. Returns are a major pain point for e-commerce brands: in the retail industry, returns are ~25%, and reducing them directly impacts absolute margin. This is a significant problem for brands.

Ilya is a 2nd-time founder with deep expertise in building conversational systems, including leading the development of the largest US clinically deployed patient-facing chatbot. As somebody who buys almost all of his clothes online, he’s been flabbergasted by how bad the support experience has been, even with AI assistants like Amazon Rufus. There has to be a better way, and that’s why we decided to build Return Signals.

Our ask

• If you have contacts at e-commerce brands (e.g., Shopify merchants) with high return rates in categories such as apparel, footwear, accessories, etc., we would greatly appreciate an intro!
• If you or someone you know has experience in retail e-commerce customer service or has felt the pain of high returns, we’d love to speak with them.

Reach out at alejandro@returnsignals.com and  ilya@returnsignals.com!