Second-hand retailer rScan to add 152 jobs, receive $1.2M in state incentives
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When you buy something from a major retail chain like Walmart or Target, how often do you end up returning it?
According to Rod Baradaran, a co-founder and CEO of rScan, that answer nationally is about 25% of the time. That means every year around $816 billion worth of products get sent back to big box stores, who don’t have the built-in capacity to handle them.
That’s where South Bend-based rScan comes in. Founded by Baradaran and a group of high school classmates in 2021, the company buys the returned products and then sells them on to other, smaller resellers for their own inventories.
“There’s very little technology or any processes. It’s kind of a dirty little secret right now for retailers that essentially they just compile these returns and they send it either to the landfill or to a buyer, but the issue is they don’t have enough buyers right now,” Baradaran said.
Currently rScan has about 10 employees, but business has been good in the last few years, especially with returns from home goods stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s.
Now thanks to a $1.2 million in tax credits from the Indiana Economic Development Corp., the company is embarking on a major expansion. Over the next four years, rScan plans to hire 152 new employees in Indiana.
Baradaran said most of the 140 or so new positions will be coaches, programmers and analytics personnel, but they won’t primarily be focused on growing out rScan. Instead, they’ll be dedicated to the success of the small retail business which rScan sells to; meaning rScan is creating its own market.
“We always wanted to help facilitate people getting started because the problem was too large for us to just go and resell all these products directly,” said Baradaran. “We always wanted to find a solution where we can help individuals essentially run their own retail businesses in order to tackle this problem.”
The decision to stay in state as they embark on their first major expansion was made easier with the IEDC tax credits.
Baradaran said he and co-founders Ryan Ryker and Julian Marquez set up their company in Indiana because a large percentage of returned items end up in warehouses near Indianapolis. The trio also graduated from Penn High School in Mishawaka, so the South Bend region was one they knew well.
“We were able to find a lot of support in the [South Bend] community to establish our first base of operations,” Baradaran said. “It’s just a fantastic community to build on and we’re in the hub of logistics in Indiana. It just clicked perfectly.”
Baradaran added he’s “grateful” to receive the IEDC tax credits — which are conditional and won’t be fully realized until rScan creates the jobs.