Blue Yonder Acquires Returns Management Player Optoro

Supply chain management company Blue Yonder announced Tuesday it has acquired returns management company Optoro.

Optoro, which boasts clients like Ralph Lauren, Steve Madden, Gap and Vineyard Vines, works to create streamlined ways for retailers and brands to manage their returns behind the scenes, resulting in a better experience for shoppers.

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Tim Robinson, corporate vice president of returns at Blue Yonder, said the company had been in talks with Optoro for about six months about the acquisition.

A major deciding factor in the deal proved to be Blue Yonder’s interest in targeting a more robust returns system for clients in North America; in 2023, the company acquired reverse logistics company Doddle, which Robinson said had less of a North American presence than Optoro does.

“Our initial [returns] acquisition was of a business that was very much UK, Europe, Asia based, in terms of its customer footprint. Part of the original investment rationale in Doddle was to acquire a product and relevance for a broader global play. We’ve recognized over the last couple of years that it would be good to have more relevance and reference here in the U.S., in North America,” Robinson said.

Robinson said that while broadening the geographical scope of its reverse logistics business has been a longer-term goal for the company, the current geopolitical environment is likely to bolster the need for sturdy return management solutions among retailers working to offset the impact President Donald Trump’s tariff strategy could have on their businesses.

“The shifting sands of taxation and tariffs are obviously having an impact on our clients’ businesses and their ability to effectively acquire and sell the goods their customers want to buy,” he said. “Returns [are] a critical part of your inventory, [and] should not be considered lost. [They] should be considered valuable inventory that can be allocated to orders, to stores…Of all the markets we serve, that sense around the need to protect and maximize value from inventory is felt more acutely and sharper here in North America than anywhere else.”

While Blue Yonder wants to expand its returns business, it’s looking to integrate the existing capabilities Doddle brought along—in tandem with its own platforms and artificial intelligence systems—to serve broad swaths of global companies. Robinson said Doddle’s customer-facing returns management solution helps steer consumer behavior, but noted that acquiring Optoro will help the software provider give its clients a more streamlined returns experience on the warehouse side.

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“We’ve come at it, historically, from the consumer end and more recently have started to build capability in the warehouse—i.e. The capability to be able to take action at the point at which returns get back to a warehouse, to help get those items back into sale, into inventory quickly; [to] prioritize SKUs which are in higher demand or maybe [of] higher value,” he said. “[Optoro’s] capability in the warehouse is several years ahead of where we are today.”

He said Optoro has two particularly intriguing systems: the ability to help retailers and third-party logistics companies handle dedicated return centers—that is to say, facilities that simply accept and process returns, rather than also simultaneously fulfilling outbound orders—and the ability to help tackle routing for in-store returns.

“A relatively high proportion of online returns actually end up back in a shop, and in many cases, our clients don’t have the inventory visibility to know whether they can resell that item in store, or whether it needs to be repatriated to an online distribution center, or whether the best answer for that SKU is for it to go down a secondary channel or liquidation channel. Optoro has some really great capabilities in that regard,” he said, noting that the company has already deployed such a process with Macy’s.

Blue Yonder declined to disclose how much it paid to acquire Doddle. Robinson noted that the acquisition is “a meaningful investment that reflects the value that Optoro brings to our business and brings to our customers.”

Robinson said it’s not immediately clear how the Optoro and Blue Yonder teams will be impacted by the acquisition.

“When these deals happen, it’s pretty rare that everybody comes [over], and it’s pretty rare that nobody’s affected in the organization in which they arrive,” he said. “We don’t have a cast-iron view on how this plays out yet.”

While Blue Yonder has aspirations to acquire additional customers by creating a more end-to-end reverse logistics infrastructure, Robinson said one of the most attractive facets of Optoro’s business is that “the vast majority of their existing customers are also already Blue Yonder customers,” which could make it easier to tap into their data reserves and optimize systems in more respects than one.

Using data to optimize clients’ businesses has remained a key focus for Blue Yonder in recent years. It has been working to build out its AI-powered agents, and Robinson said that once Optoro’s capabilities have been replatformed onto Blue Yonder, he foresees the company’s warehouse management agent leveraging data ingested by Optoro systems to help companies determine a variety of factors about their warehouses and return centers, including predictive labor staffing needs.

“Our intention is to be able to apply these technologies to the Optoro products quickly,” Robinson said. “This doesn’t feel like it’s going to be a long, drawn-out remodeling or reengineering process.”

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