Max Retail’s Pivot Playbook: How Manual Operations Led to Product-Market Fit

Discover how Max Retail evolved from manual inventory matching to a tech platform through unconventional MVPs. Learn key lessons on validating market needs before building technology.

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Max Retail’s Pivot Playbook: How Manual Operations Led to Product-Market Fit

Max Retail’s Pivot Playbook: How Manual Operations Led to Product-Market Fit

Before writing a single line of code, Melodie van der Baan spent years manually solving the excess inventory problem for independent retailers. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, she revealed how this hands-on experience shaped Max Retail’s evolution from a person-to-person service to a technology platform.

The Accidental Market Research

As a sales representative without formal fashion education, Melodie’s first venture was surprisingly low-tech: “I had a sprinter van. And this sprinter van, I loaded up with all of the collections of the designers I represented, and I would drive the sprinter van from South Florida up to Boston, over to Chicago, down to San Antonio and back.”

This cross-country journey revealed a persistent pattern: “Without fail, when I entered a store, they would point out to me what didn’t sell from the season before.” With brands unwilling to take back merchandise and retailers needing to clear inventory before making new purchases, Melodie became an inadvertent matchmaker.

The First MVP: A Phone and a Contact List

Instead of immediately building technology, Melodie tested the market through manual operations. “If I was in Baltimore looking at a size run of striped dresses that were not performing well, but I knew they were blowing out in Birmingham, I would call that buyer in Birmingham and say, ‘Hey, listen, I have some more of those great dresses.'”

This manual process worked, generating successful merchandise transfers and happy retailers. But as her husband pointed out, “Mel, this is not a you problem. This is an industry problem. This is a lack of a network that needs to exist between independent retailers.”

Validating Before Building

By 2016, Melodie was ready to tackle the problem systematically. Following Steve Blank’s Lean Startup methodology, she began with customer discovery: “I just started calling brands and retailers and saying, ‘Hey, it’s Melody, your favorite rep, I’m a retailer now, like you. But I remember you had this problem. What have you been doing about it?'”

The response was unanimous: “Nothing, Mel. There’s been nothing to help me.” This validation led to her minimum viable product: “My minimum viable product was just to get on the phone and start facilitating merchandise exchanges between retailers again.”

The Technical Reality Check

When they finally built their first technical solution, an engineer friend’s review was brutal: “This isn’t anything useful. I could rebuild it in a month.” Those became “famous last words” as he spent the next two years architecting their first B2B marketplace.

Crisis-Driven Innovation

Launching in February 2020 forced another pivot. The pandemic shut down retail stores nationwide, rendering their B2B marketplace temporarily useless. This crisis led to discovering new opportunities through partnerships with platforms like Poshmark, who saw value in their network of brand-name inventory.

The Infrastructure Evolution

Today, Max Retail has evolved beyond its marketplace origins. “We are actually e-commerce infrastructure,” Melodie explains. The platform enables retailers and brands to “sell their excess inventory across a network of demand that would otherwise be too challenging for them to do on their own.”

The impact validates their approach: average monthly payouts to retailers grew from $151 in early 2022 to $1,200 today, with top performers earning over $20,000 monthly.

For B2B founders, Max Retail’s journey offers a crucial lesson: sometimes the best way to validate a market isn’t to build technology first, but to solve the problem manually until you deeply understand the customer needs you’re trying to address. As Melodie advises: “Don’t go looking for a problem to solve. Solve the problem that haunts you day and night, and you will never want to remove yourself from it.”

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