Unused Inventory Onboarding and Sales Integration App from Queen of Raw Now Live on SAP® App Center

New York, New York - August 18, 2020 - Queen of Raw, a New York-based technology company with a marketplace solution that matches fashion organizations looking to offload excess fabrics with buyers interested in high quality sustainable and affordable textiles, today announced that its Unused Inventory Onboarding and Sales Integration app is now available on SAP® App Center, the digital marketplace for SAP partner offerings. By integrating with SAP S/4HANA®, the Queen of Raw app automates the process of tracking unused textiles and sending the inventory to Queen of Raw’s marketplace.  

Queen of Raw addresses the $120 billion a year of unused textiles that are thrown into landfills, burned, or laid to rest in warehouses. Co-founders Stephanie Benedetto and Phil Derasmo met more than six years ago and officially launched their marketplace solution in 2018. As the platform grew, the company quickly realized the need for specialized tools to meet the demand for a more sustainable and efficient textiles supply chain, such as those provided through its partnership with SAP.

Supply chain waste matters now more than ever. “We are in a period of massive disruption requiring us to digitally innovate our way out of crisis. For supply chains to be resilient and agile,” says Stephanie Benedetto, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Queen of Raw, “we must reduce costs for our customers while securing the materials needed across their supply lines in real time.” Unused textiles can still fill orders for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) or otherwise, on demand, at a discount, and away from areas impacted by disruption, while supporting localization and commitments to sustainability.

 “The pandemic has spotlighted serious gaps in our textiles supply chain as world events caused, on the one hand, massive delays and shortages of critical materials, and costly excess fabrics that became liabilities as sales patterns shifted due to shut-downs, on the other,” said Phil Derasmo, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Queen of Raw.  “Today's fashion brands need an easy-to-integrate scalable solution that provides them with the flexibility to shift inventories quickly while supporting the industry with access to quality materials. We provide the tools for industries that work with textiles to help with the digital transformation of their businesses.”

Benedetto and Derasmo know textiles. Benedetto's family has been in the business for over 100 years. When she first met Derasmo and discussed the problem of textile waste, they sketched out the solution on the back of a napkin and have been building it together ever since. 

For some customers of Queen of Raw, including the world’s biggest fast fashion and luxury brands, the amount of wasted inventory is so big that it represents up to 15% of their bottom line. “At this volume,” says Benedetto, “waste isn’t just environmentally irresponsible -- it’s a CFO issue.” One T-shirt takes 700 gallons of water to produce. Queen of Raw has already saved over a billion gallons of water -- enough clean water for 1.4 million people to drink around the world for 3 years, while saving its enterprise customers millions of dollars in the process.

The integration with SAP S/4HANA allows users to onboard their excess inventory to Queen of Raw’s marketplace in seconds, no coding or extra resources required. Once onboarded, inventory gets marketed and sold to Queen of Raw’s community of over 175,000 global users. The ready-to-use platform makes it easy to sync inventory data with SAP solutions and, when a sale is made, Queen of Raw takes care of the end-to-end fulfillment and logistics. The actions taken across Queen of Raw also support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

“The innovation that Queen of Raw is driving is critical for our fashion retail customers who are looking for solutions to become sustainable,” says Vanessa Liu, Vice President of SAP.iO Foundries North America. “We are proud to have selected Queen of Raw as one the companies we accelerated in our SAP.iO Foundry New York Spring 2020 Retail Tech Cohort, and to see them now with a solution integrated with SAP solutions and available on SAP App Center.”

Queen of Raw has also closed $1.5M of its series seed financing in a priced round, including prior convertible instruments. The round was led by True Wealth Ventures, a venture capital fund specializing in women-led businesses improving environmental or human health. The round also included minority investor Solve Innovation Future, the philanthropic investment vehicle of MIT Solve, which supports Solver teams with catalytic investments.

“Given that the fashion industry is considered to be the second most polluting industry in the world, we had been looking for an investment in the textile space for a while. Until now, we had not found a company with such massive impact potential to scale globally as demonstrated by Queen of Raw,” says Sara Brand PhD, Founding General Partner of True Wealth Ventures and now Board member of Queen of Raw. “We invest exclusively in women-led companies given their historical financial outperformance and are really excited about the experienced team and Stephanie Benedetto’s leadership in this industry.”

“With all this valuable information about a customer’s waste, that was previously dark data, we’ll calculate the amount of water, toxins, energy, and dollars saved by leveraging the Queen of Raw platform,” says Derasmo.  Before joining Queen of Raw, Derasmo spent over fifteen years building solutions for large organizations from the Department of Environmental Protection to Citi. Leveraging blockchain and machine learning-based technology, Queen of Raw also helps businesses intelligently minimize waste streams going forward, turning pollution into profit and helping solve the world’s water crisis.

About Queen of Raw
Queen of Raw’s marketplace matches buyers and sellers of unused fabric. It provides fashion brands and retailers a quick and easy way to secure discounted materials based on real-time location and availability, while generating revenue and offloading excess stock. An integrated dashboard allows enterprise organizations to visualize savings to their bottom- and top-lines as well as to the environment by the actions taken across the Queen of Raw platform. Learn more at queenofraw.com.

About True Wealth Ventures
True Wealth Ventures is focused on investing in women leaders who have proven to financially outperform, in high growth markets of sustainable consumer and consumer health, and where women are making the vast majority of purchase decisions. It is proud to be a Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) Certified Fund. Additional information can be found at truewealthvc.com.

About MIT Solve
Solve is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a mission to solve world challenges. Solve is a marketplace for social impact innovation. Through open innovation challenges, Solve finds incredible tech-based social entrepreneurs all around the world. Solve then brings together MIT’s innovation ecosystem and a community of members to fund and support these entrepreneurs to help them drive lasting, transformational impact. Join Solve on this journey at solve.mit.edu.

About SAP App Center
At SAP App Center, businesses can discover approximately 1,600 innovative partner solutions that integrate with and extend SAP solutions. There, customers can find the SAP-validated partner apps they need to grow their business. And for each purchase made on SAP App Center, SAP will plant a tree. Find, try, and buy SAP partner solutions digitally at www.sapappcenter.com.

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For more information, press only:
Stephanie Benedetto, 646-583-0076, stephanie@queenofraw.com