Lifecycle Accountability Audit A Strategic Reset for Product, Assortment & Innovation
$850 billion.
That’s the estimated value of merchandise returned in 2025.
Roughly 17% of all holiday sales flowed backward through the system—returned, rerouted, resold, liquidated, or discarded.
And here’s the detail that should make every product leader pause:
The Wall Street Journal reported recently on the rise of gig-economy workers earning $34 an hour to return products on behalf of consumers.
An entire economy now exists to manage unwanted purchases.
Sit with that for a moment.
When I ask merchants, founders, and product leaders how sustainability shows up across their entire product lifecycle—from ideation to end-of-life—the room often gets quiet.
Not because people don’t care.
But because ownership gets murky.
Who owns the clutter?
Who owns the waste?
Who owns the product once it’s no longer on your P&L?
Too often, sustainability becomes something that happens after the product is made—
not something that shapes whether it should exist in the first place.
Most sustainability strategies focus on remediation:
• recyclable packaging
• resale programs
• donation bins
• carbon offsets
• return logistics
These efforts matter.
But they’re not strategy.
They’re cleanup.
And cleanup is expensive, operationally complex, and increasingly disconnected from the original decision that created the problem.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
If you don’t have a disciplined product development process paired with real lifecycle management, you’re outsourcing accountability.
You’re pushing the cost—financial, environmental, operational—downstream.
Kicking the can to the next player in the value chain isn’t a strategy.
It’s denial.
And no, the product isn’t “gone” just because it’s off your books.
I say this as someone who loves product.
I’ve built a career bringing products to market—shaping assortments, launching innovation, scaling brands. Product is creativity. It’s possibility. It’s growth.
But this past holiday season, shopping beauty, something struck me.
I kept buying staples.
The “new and interesting” products?
Surprisingly scarce.
So I started asking people a simple question:
“What’s the most interesting product you’ve bought in the last three months?”
More often than not, the response is a pause.
Then: “Hmm… let me think.”
That hesitation is telling.
Because if customers can’t immediately recall what excited them, we may not have a sustainability problem.
We may have an innovation problem.
Too many products today are:
• incremental
• reactive
• trend-chasing
• “me-too” by design
• rushed to meet calendar demands
Not because teams lack talent—but because the system rewards motion over meaning.
Launch velocity becomes the metric.
Assortment size becomes the proxy for growth.
And restraint quietly disappears from the room.
So let’s talk about solutions—real ones.
Sustainable innovation doesn’t start with packaging.
It starts with fewer, better decisions upstream.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
1. Fewer SKUs. Clearer roles.
Every product should earn its place. If it doesn’t have a distinct job—incremental demand, margin expansion, or true differentiation—it shouldn’t exist.
2. Lifecycle thinking at gate one—not gate five.
End-of-life planning shouldn’t be a post-launch exercise. Ask early: How long should this product live? How will it exit? What happens if it fails?
3. Innovation metrics that reward impact, not volume.
Shift success measures from “how many launches” to “how many mattered.”
4. Permission to stop.
Killing products—and ideas—early is one of the most sustainable acts a business can take.
5. Strategy that values restraint as much as creativity.
Not everything needs to be made. And not every trend deserves a SKU.
Which brings us to the question more leaders need to ask:
What if your most sustainable move this year
wasn’t launching something new…
but choosing not to make a product at all?
Less noise.
More meaning.
Real accountability—by design, not by cleanup.
This is Part One of a deeper exploration.
Next, I’ll dig into:
• where product development processes actually break down
• how calendar-driven innovation fuels waste
• what “lifecycle ownership” looks like inside high-performing organizations
• and how merchants can regain control without slowing growth
Because sustainability isn’t a department.
It’s a decision framework.
And it starts long before a product ever reaches the shelf.