Tern Eco: Making circularity easy for micro- and small businesses

This post is authored by Zoe Rowswell and Kate Walmsley, co-founders of Tern Eco, and Grace Natabaalo from Mastercard Strive. Tern Eco is a retail tech solution designed to support retailers to deliver profitable growth through circular models that drive customer engagement.

Retail is changing. Sustainability is top of the agenda, and retailers are adopting circular models to retain their customers and grow their businesses. In the UK, the production of unnecessary waste—including electronic, textile, plastic, and food waste—amounts to thousands of tons annually, which adds to carbon emissions. Small businesses contribute to 51% of the direct carbon emissions caused by businesses in the UK. The circular economy aims to minimize this waste by keeping products, materials, and resources in use for as long as possible, reducing the 80% of products that currently go to landfills or incinerators.

While small retailers make up 99% of the global retail population, existing circular solutions are often expensive, inflexible, and time-consuming. They aren’t designed with smaller retailers in mind.

At Tern Eco, our solution helps retailers of any size create brand-owned circular models that meet business objectives and sustainability goals, reducing waste while driving customer lifetime value and unlocking new opportunities for revenue growth. Our white-labeled software lives within a brand’s own website and automates trade-ins (or take-backs), enabling customers to exchange preowned items for store credit.

Tern Eco is a proud partner of Mastercard Strive. With the Innovation Fund grant, we aim to make it even easier for small retailers to compete in this rapidly changing market by extending our software’s current capabilities to support multiple circular models, such as repairs, upcycling, automated reselling, and recycling.

How we’re addressing circular business models

The Tern 2.0 solution will enable smaller time-poor retailers to intuitively set up their circular retail program, offering greater flexibility and new functionality. Following interviews with current and prospective clients, we have identified common use cases that will simplify the onboarding process and give small retailers the additional tools they need to run their circular retail programs successfully. These include:

1. Repairs and Upcycling: This new functionality will facilitate the repair, refurbishment, and upcycling of items through the “purchase of a service” related to a specific customer-owned product. Leveraging Tern’s integrated capability for reverse logistics, the customer can easily send their item in for the service they have purchased - and the retailer will have the tools they need to track and manage the order.
2. Relisting for Resale: This additional functionality will enable retailers to easily list products that have been traded in for resale, by creating a draft product listing as part of the trade-in receiving process and saving retailers time.
3. Omnichannel Service: This new application is for use in a physical store, where retail staff can manage the circular services on offer. It provides more convenience to retailers and in-store shoppers alike.
4. Retail Admin Portal: These new services will be integrated within a single permissions-based “retail admin portal.” This allows retailers to easily set up and manage multiple circular retail services concurrently (e.g., both trade-in and repair services).

The transition to Net Zero is not only imperative for the health of the planet and our collective future, but it also presents an incredible opportunity for economic growth with significant benefits for small retailers: from cost reduction and competitive differentiation to driving sales, brand advocacy, and customer growth.

There is no greater problem to solve, and we are excited to embark on this journey with Mastercard Strive to offer an accessible, affordable solution that enables micro- and small retailers to make the critical shift from linear to circular models.