Boost Liquidation

Boost Liquidation bought Amazon customer returns by the truckload, tested and graded them item by item, and resold them individually rather than flipping them by the pallet to other liquidators. The thesis was that customer returns, tested and classified one piece at a time, could be sold individually B2C instead of B2B, opening a market the pallet-flippers were leaving untouched. The tagline printed on the logo was Revolutionizing the Liquidation Industry. The public positioning was more modest and more accurate: a liquidation resource for retailers, eBay sellers, flea marketers and craigslisters, specializing in customer returns and wholesale closeouts. Archived snapshots list Maddison Lake as president.

The model was measured honestly in the company's own records, including its losses. A meaningful share of what arrived on every truckload was unrecoverable before any labor was applied, and only a small fraction arrived new in box. Those measurements sat in the middle of the company's own expansion planning rather than in a footnote, where a less rigorous operator would have buried them.

In 2012 the company sought outside capital to scale the model, and the capital never arrived. In March 2013 it wound the operation down in public view, selling its own pallet shelving, its forklift and a company car in a going-out-of-business sale advertised with television spots, balloons and an inflatable arm man. The B2C thesis that had justified the entire enterprise ended by reverting to the physical storefront model Boost had been created to escape.