Key Takeaways:
Every beauty brand has a dirty secret tucked away in its warehouse: unsold inventory. Not the kind that makes headlines; the kind that keeps supply chain managers up at night. A discontinued product line. A reformulation that didn't launch. A purchase order that got canceled. Whatever the reason, most beauty brands are quietly warehousing millions of dollars worth of inventory that will never reach their core customers—yet many feel embarrassed about it.
They shouldn't. The reality is stark: According to Shopify, only 50% of beauty products produced in a given year actually sell in that year. About 10% of that inventory ends up incinerated, translating to roughly $50 billion annually of otherwise viable product going to waste. And yet most brands treat excess inventory like a personal failure rather than a business problem with a solution.
That's where Highstock comes in. Founded by Camille van Horne, an Instacart alumna, the AI-powered B2B marketplace is quietly reshaping how beauty brands think about their excess inventory.
The Unproductive Inventory Problem
The structural incentives built into beauty supply chains make overproduction nearly inevitable. Purchase orders are written with penalties for slow response, retailers demand buffer stock, and social media creates unpredictable swings in consumer demand. When excess inventory inevitably accumulates, brands face a brutal choice: run sample sales or donate product (which generates minimal recovery), heavily discount through value retailers like TJ Maxx or Ross (which risks diluting hard-won brand equity in core markets), or destroy it. Most brands choose destruction as the "cleanest" option—yet there's a dark irony at play. Incineration is expensive, environmentally devastating, and carries genuine reputational weight. Brands don't want to be associated with destroying product, feeling it reflects poorly on their demand planning and brand strength. What makes this worse is that most don't realize destruction costs significantly more than finding alternative buyers. The math doesn't work in destruction's favor, yet because admitting to excess inventory feels like a failure, many brands accept the financial hit rather than explore other options.
Enter Highstock
Excess inventory isn't a problem confined to struggling start-ups. It's a universal reality. All brands have inventory that's unproductive, van Horne explained. Most of what we see is true surplus inventory driven by unpredictable demand. "In beauty, expiration dates make brands even more anxious as they approach the three-year mark," she said. The issue is magnified in beauty because products don't just sit idle; they carry expiration dates that turn surplus into a ticking clock.
For Versed, a clean beauty brand managing older packaging inventory, the challenge was acute. "We had already exhausted most of the traditional off-price channels and still needed a way to move that inventory while protecting brand integrity,” Andy Chiu, Versed's CEO, explained. “We also wanted to prevent it from ending up on marketplaces like Amazon, where it could confuse customers or dilute the brand." Traditional liquidation channels offered no guarantees about where product would end up—a critical concern for brands trying to maintain control over their positioning.
Highstock was built to address this pain point. Instead of warehousing millions in product that risks expiration, brands can recover value, redirect goods into non-core markets, and avoid the stigma of public overstock with Highstock. In doing so, Highstock reframes excess inventory from a liability into a strategic lever for growth and sustainability.
From Surplus to Smart Supply
Highstock's true competitive advantage is in connecting buyers and sellers, and in the intelligence layer it's building around that marketplace. The company is building an AI-powered platform designed to take friction out of wholesale beauty, with features like automated catalog generation, smart matching between sellers and buyers, dynamic pricing intelligence, and customs and regulatory paperwork handled seamlessly. On the buyer side, the innovation is equally transformative. Instead of clunky spreadsheets or opaque negotiations, Highstock is developing a conversational interface where plain text requests are instantly structured into an order. As van Horne explains, Highstock is introducing "a lot more smarts and intelligence … buyers will be able to just say what they want, and our AI will structure it seamlessly." This represents a watershed moment for AI adoption in wholesale beauty, an industry notoriously resistant to technology adoption. For years, buyers resisted digital platforms, preferring relationships and handshakes. But recent AI capabilities have fundamentally shifted that calculation. Suddenly, technology isn't a friction point; it's an enabler. Highstock is capitalizing on this inflection point, building the infrastructure that allows an industry historically dominated by opaque brokers and personal relationships to operate with transparency, efficiency, and scale.
Discretion as a Service
For beauty brands, protecting equity is as important as moving product. Highstock has built its model around discretion, vetting every wholesale buyer on the platform and enforcing contractual restrictions that prevent goods from leaking into undesirable channels. Bad actors are swiftly removed, and brands remain firmly in control, able to see the persona of each buyer before approving a deal. "We list inventory discreetly and find compelling bulk buyers to purchase it and take it out of the brand's core market," van Horne explained.
Highstock gave Chiu a controlled and discreet way to offload that inventory without putting the brand at risk. “The traditional off-price world is opaque, and brands often have little control over where product ends up—Highstock removes that risk,” Chiu noted. They take the entire process off Versed’s plate, which is easier than dealing with individual liquidators, he added.
Quiet Scale, Loud Results
Highstock's growth has been anything but quiet. In just a short span, the platform has diverted more than 10 million pounds of product from landfills, and moves millions of dollars in transaction value per month. For brands like Versed, the results have been tangible and transformative. The platform helped Versed recoup hundreds of thousands of dollars on inventory that would have otherwise been disposed of or recycled—a recovery that would have been impossible through traditional channels.
The numbers underscore that discretion doesn't mean stagnation—behind the scenes, Highstock is scaling rapidly and proving that surplus can be both profitable and sustainable.
The Buyer's View
Highstock prides itself on having a broad range of buyers who purchase opportunistically ranging from international distributors to independent business owners who stream on apps like Whatnot. For Whatnot reseller Britney, Highstock has become indispensable to her business. She credits the platform with helping her scale thanks to its breadth of legitimate, brand-backed inventory and the assurance that every transaction is vetted. One of the most attractive features, she explained, is the built-in offer system, which allows buyers to negotiate pricing discreetly. She emphasized the importance of variety: with new products added almost daily, she can keep pace with consumers who expect constant novelty in e-commerce. By sourcing vetted, surplus inventory, buyers like her expand access to beauty products without eroding brand positioning. As Britney put it, "It's a slam dunk. Not only do they have great products and negotiation built in, but the integrity behind the company makes them one of my top picks."
Circular Beauty, Without the Spin
For all the financial upside, Highstock's model carries an equally powerful environmental dividend. Sustainability isn't the headline brands lead with when they sign on; most come for the promise of recovered value and brand protection. But the impact is undeniable. Every pallet that avoids the furnace reduces waste, lowers carbon impact, and reframes beauty's relationship with excess. As van Horne puts it, "It's a great way to off-load all this excess every brand has at some point—and give it a minimum viable path forward." In a sector often criticized for its environmental footprint, Highstock is proving that smarter supply chains can be profitable and planet-positive.
The Future of Surplus
If discretion and sustainability define Highstock's present, regulation and global demand will shape its future. New rules like Extended Producer Responsibility (ESPR) are poised to make destruction costly and legally fraught, forcing brands to account for the environmental impact of their supply chains. International appetite for beauty continues to grow in fragmented markets that traditional distribution models struggle to reach. Highstock sits at the intersection of these pressures, offering a path forward that is both compliant and commercially savvy. "It's about creating a magical, easy way for brands to move product out of their core markets without damaging their positioning," van Horne noted.
In a beauty industry obsessed with scarcity, Highstock proves surplus can be just as strategic—and that the future of inventory management will be defined not by waste, but by intelligence. There’s opportunity behind every hushed warehouse conversation—and Highstock is turning whispers into wins.
