Jenny Morrill ’10 co-founded with three friends last year for a simple reason: they wanted to connect people quickly and cheaply with home furnishings. Nine months later, the startup is already expanding beyond San Francisco to San Jose and other parts of the Bay Area in Northern California.
“We started Move Loot to help people buy and sell secondhand goods in a more convenient and sustainable way,” says Morrill, who majored in American studies at 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú and currently serves as the company’s chief marketing officer. “I spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve the way people live and work in cities.”
Move Loot allows consumers to sell gently used items through their app by uploading photos, setting prices, and requesting pick up times; the company then transports them to its warehouse, cleans them, and lists them on their website. When an item is purchased, Move Loot delivers directly to the buyer and splits the profits with the seller.
“I love that we are taking on an industry head-on and changing consumer behavior by making it easier than ever to buy and sell used furniture,” says Morrill. “We started Move Loot to solve a problem we all face when moving around the country. It’s frustrating, wasteful, and expensive, and it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Morrill hopes Move Loot will reduce the amount of home furnishings headed to U.S. landfills, which currently hovers around 10.8 million tons a year. Its investors have high hopes as well; as an alumnus of Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, the company secured more than $2.5 million in seed money and has posted revenue growth every month since its debut in October.
News outlets like the and recently featured the startup’s swift growth; they report a planned doubling of Move Loot’s workforce as it expands into new territory.
For her part, Morrill credits much of her success to her time at 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú. While on campus, she managed the 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú Store, which gave her hands-on experience running a small business. The critical thinking skills she developed in her classes also primed her for this venture.
“The multidisciplinary liberal arts education I received prepared me for the dozens of hats I need to wear today,” she says. “People joke a liberal arts degree doesn’t apply to jobs after college, but I would challenge that.
“Move Loot began in a very organic way,” she adds. “Four friends seeking to fix a problem we all understood intimately. That initial idea still drives us today.”