How Abby Nawrocki Left a 12-Year Supply Chain Career to Fix a $163 Billion Problem

This story first appeared in Forum Ventures' Founder Stories Series on Substack.

▶ Watch Abby's full founder story on YouTube

Retail has spent years fixated on returns — a widely cited $850 billion of merchandise Americans send back to retailers each year, with close to 10 billion pounds of returned goods in landfills annually.

But returns aren't the only merchandise ending up in landfills. About $163 billion in excess inventory that never touches a customer in the first place — unopened, unused, in perfectly good condition — gets thrown away simply because no one built a path for it to go anywhere else.

Forum Ventures-backed founder Abby Nawrocki built her startup, Stock, around this gap after watching it happen for 12 years while running the warehouses behind some of the biggest brands in the world. She is now a Forum Ventures portfolio founder, and Stock has moved more than $28 million in donated goods and 2 million units of inventory since launch.

Abby ran US distribution for Zara, then for Apple, then for a startup serving thousands of Shopify brands that was eventually acquired by Shopify itself, where she went on to run the fulfillment network. Across every one of those roles, the same pattern kept showing up on the warehouse floor: inventory leftover when a store closes, seasonal stock that doesn't sell through, sizes nobody wants, a small manufacturing error on inventory that's otherwise perfectly good — all of it sent to the landfill.

Abby knew there had to be a better way.

How Abby validated Stock before leaving her corporate job

Abby wasn't looking to start a company. She was running Shopify's fulfillment network and dealing directly with the fallout of brands closing their storefronts — 3PLs left holding inventory with nowhere good to send it.

Four million brands sell on Shopify, and roughly 90 percent of them close within their first three years. When they shut down, the physical inventory they leave behind lands with their 3PL, which is usually left to figure out where it goes next.

She got tired of watching it happen with no real fix on hand. She built out a process for identifying what excess inventory existed, where it could go instead of a landfill, and how to actually move it there — mostly to make her own job function. "I was just solving a business problem for myself and my everyday life," she said.

Once the process held up under real use, she started wondering if it was worth more than just solving her own headache. "I thought, I'm sure others in my situation need something like this as well," Abby said. So she went looking for people doing her same job at other companies and asked them directly: "Could you use this?" The first person said yes. So did the second. Landing two paying customers off nothing more than a direct ask told her something real was there. "Then I thought, okay, I need to figure out venture capital and how I can make this a real, legitimate company," she said. "And that's when I came to Forum Ventures."

She had the idea in August of 2024. She and her husband incorporated that January, mostly to make it official on paper, while she kept working her corporate job full time and kept building the case that this was bigger than a side project.

How Abby found Forum Ventures and closed her first check

Abby set out to meet VCs in Chicago, researching what events were happening and signing up when she could go. She took the same approach as she would at a warehouse she was trying to fix: walk the floor, ask questions, figure out how the machine actually worked.

Abby took a day off work to attend one of Forum's monthly coffee meetups in Chicago. She met Neal Sarraf, Forum Managing Director, that day, and within weeks Forum extended an investment. Abby accepted and put in her resignation soon after.

Her employer had already seen the writing on the wall, having watched her build the process and talk for months about how the industry needed exactly this. When she eventually left, that same company became one of her first customers.

Stock officially launched on October 13, 2025. Abby describes the leap itself as moving "from corporate into Founderland" — something she'd watched from a distance for years and never quite believed was hers to take until Forum made it feel possible.

Building Stock as a solo founder

Abby built Stock as a solo founder, and feels that decision has influenced a lot along the way. "I didn't know if being a solo founder or having a co-founder was right or wrong, what was expected or what would be scoffed at," she said. She found investors split roughly down the middle: half wanted two founders on a cap table, half wanted one. So she ended up aligning with the investors that preferred solo founders, and ones that would build in the trenches with her.

Abby chose Forum Ventures as her first investor to help fill the go-to-market, sales, and fundraising experience gap during the early days. She then hired their first full-time engineer shortly after closing her pre-seed round.

Why Stock leads with ROI, not sustainability

Most of the category leans on sustainability, circularity, the triple bottom line — donate instead of landfill. However, Abby watched that framing get deprioritized again and again, treated as a nice-to-have instead of something worth acting on now.

"We're not looking at it from a sustainability ESG perspective," she said. "We're saying let us solve an operational problem faster with higher ROI." That means leading with speed, cost, and quality — backed by tax documentation through a vetted 501(c)(3), faster turnaround, and systems that plug directly into a brand's existing warehouse management setup. "When we talk about cost, speed, and quality, people listen," she said.

That positioning has tracked closely with Stock's growth. The company has moved more than $28 million in donated goods and 2 million units of inventory to date, matched across a network of 1.5 million nonprofits, with revenue growing 78 percent quarter over quarter in 2025.

How Abby raised a pre-seed in 8 weeks

By the time Abby raised her pre-seed, the conviction she'd built through Forum's network turned what could have been a grueling process into something she genuinely enjoyed — and she's the first to admit that's not a normal reaction. "I think I'm a little bit psychotic in that I enjoyed it," she said, laughing. "It's like that very A-type competitive space."

She sent 128 initial outreach emails and calls, tracked and narrowed that list down to 60 real conversations, and launched the raise on January 20th. She had a verbal commitment from a lead investor by February 24th — about four weeks later — and the round closed within eight weeks total. The pace in those early weeks was intense, with days that stretched to thirteen calls, the same pitch repeated over and over, and nights spent refining the data room between conversations. "It was energizing," she said. "We were done within eight weeks, and money was in the bank."

What Forum Ventures provides early-stage founders

Working alongside Deirdre, her Managing Director, and the broader Forum team gave Abby something she found herself needing more than she expected: structure. Leaving a corporate job with defined hours and clear expectations for the openness of founder life left her without an obvious place to start. "Nobody's here telling me what to do," she said, describing the disorientation of those first weeks.

Forum filled that gap with concrete benchmarks for where Stock should be at one, three, six, and twelve months — tailored specifically to her business — along with a network of other founders working through the same fundraising and hiring questions in parallel. By the time she went out to raise, that groundwork had done most of the heavy lifting. "It was like being served on a silver platter," she said.

Abby's advice for founders 8–12 months behind her

Asked what she'd tell a founder eight to twelve months behind her, Abby pointed straight to the earliest and most important milestone: finding someone willing to pay for the solution. "Just go get someone to pay you a hundred bucks to do whatever it is that you're trying to do," she said, "and then figure it out from there." Everything else — the product, the brand, the roadmap — only makes sense once that first paying customer proves there's a real business underneath the idea.

The question she's still working through is when to hire full time versus bring in a vendor for a given piece of work. At this stage, every dollar raised still feels precious. Her approach has been to treat it as a constant trade-off worth making deliberately rather than avoiding.

Stock's next milestone is a seed round planned for January, with a goal of becoming fully self-serve across brands, 3PLs, and nonprofits within the year. Further out, Abby wants Stock to become the default infrastructure companies reach for when they're deciding what happens to inventory at the end of its life. "Our intention is to become the one brain," she said, "the central intelligence for end-of-life inventory dispositioning across the board."

Stock is a Forum Ventures portfolio company. Learn more about how Forum supports early-stage B2B SaaS founders at forumvc.com.