Inventory Scouts
Powered by Boost
A directory of verified and credit-checked wholesale suppliers, powered by Boost
- Years active
- 2013-2014
- Status
- Dormant
- Confidence
- Verified in a primary document or official record
Inventory Scouts was developed in January 2013 by Maddison Lake and a senior colleague, in the final months of the Boost Liquidation era, and it was branded "Powered by Boost." Its archived description is a directory of wholesale inventory suppliers, liquidators, drop shippers and manufacturers, sold to businesses reselling on eBay, on Amazon or on their own websites. What separated it from every other supplier list on the internet was the qualifier the company put in front of the word supplier: verified and credit-checked.
The 2013 site sold that distinction hard. Its headline claimed 18,057 verified suppliers and used the parent brand as a verb, promising to boost the subscriber's bottom line. It offered a vendor rating system available only to subscribers, a scam insurance commitment, and the assurance that every supplier in the database had been run through a full background and credit check for outstanding legal or financial problems. One footer link pointed back to Boost Liquidation. The wordmark set "Inventory" in grey against "Scouts" in teal, with a magnifying glass forming the letter O.
The venture was short-lived. The portfolio record gives it 2013 to 2014, and the site is dead.
The supplier count, the vendor ratings and the credit checks are the company's own claims on its 2013 site. Neither the figure nor the checking process is independently verified anywhere in the record.
The strategic point
Why it mattered
Credit-checking suppliers is the verification discipline of Storage Unit Auction List applied to a different population. The same operational instinct that had staff telephoning storage facilities forty-eight hours before an auction, to catch the cancellations and corrections before a subscriber drove to one, was now being pointed at the creditworthiness of wholesale vendors.
Across three completely different industries the group repeatedly built the same asset: a list that had been checked by a human being. Storage auctions, returned consumer goods and wholesale sourcing have nothing in common except that in each of them the reliable version of a public list was worth paying for. Inventory Scouts is also the moment the lesson of Boost was acted on directly, because it sold the knowledge of where merchandise came from and required no merchandise at all.
Archive
Screen capture
The inventoryscouts.com homepage as archived in 2013, offering scam insurance, a subscriber-only vendor rating system and credit-checked suppliers. The footer links back to Boost Liquidation.
Reference
The record
- Portfolio group
- Legacy record
- Years active
- 2013-2014
- Status
- Dormant
- Confidence
- Verified in a primary document or official record
- Domain
- inventoryscouts.com
- Mark source
- Recovered from an archived capture, 2013
- Mark dimensions
- 200 × 32 pixels