Let’s take a straw poll. How much packaging from deliveries is in your house right now? How does that compare to two years ago?

I’m guessing the answers to those are something like A) a lot and B) much more.

And that isn’t surprising – the pandemic has just exacerbated a shift towards e-commerce that has been a decade in the making. This is a shift not many people – and virtually no brands – have questioned, until Olive.

Founded in February 2021 by Nate Faust (co-founder of Jet.com, a Challenger to Watch from 2016), Olive is on a mission to reshape the entire home delivery supply chain in order to get rid of single-use packaging.

This is clearly an enormous task. Not only are supply chains extremely complex and difficult to change, but it also sets them in direct opposition to the e-commerce giants who have no interest in changing a system that works perfectly well for them.

Olive is going up against Goliath – so they’ve picked up their slingshot. Rather than competing on the industry’s terms, Olive has used a Next-Generation narrative to position these supposedly cutting-edge technology companies as behind the times and redefined what convenience means for home delivery.

E-commerce has always been about speed, with businesses both big and small in an arms race to slash delivery times from 5-10 business days to as little as 10 minutes. All the while training consumers that faster = better and sweeping the nasty ethical and sustainability implications of that speed under the rug.

But while that may seem like an incredible amount of change in just the blink of an eye, Olive shows us that the way items are delivered and returned hasn’t actually changed at all in the past 25 years – a lifetime in the world of tech. So they are here to change the criteria for choice from simply speed, to something more efficient, sustainable, and convenient for both customers and businesses.

Free to customers (businesses pay commission on every order), Olive provides consolidated deliveries from over 100 fashion & beauty retailers – anything you order comes on a pre-determined day, in one re-usable box. Need to make returns? Just pop them back in the box to be picked up again.

While Olive is still a long way from making a dent in their goal to remove single-use packaging from e-commerce (retailers still send items in traditional packaging, and Olive just re-boxes them to send on to consumers), what is notable is both their ambition to go up against the status quo and paint a different vision of what progress looks like, and the speed at which they’ve been able to do that. With hefty investment behind them, they’ve been scaling rapidly since launch.

They’ve shown that ‘sustainability’ businesses are no longer a niche venture. And they don’t require the trade-offs we might think.

It’s time that the e-commerce big fish sat up and took notice.

Kirstin Piening is a Strategist at eatbigfish.