Lost & Found Reimagined with Robin

From spaces to banking and eyewear and swimming pools, offline businesses are rapidly being reinvented. On my LinkedIn Live show “Reimagined with Robin,” I conduct live 15-minute interviews with founders and change-drivers who are reimagining all aspects of life. Recently, I spoke with Skyler Logsdon , CEO and co-founder of Boomerang , a business that helps you find your lost items and gets them to you as quickly and easily as possible.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:?

What are you reimagining?

Everyone has a lost and found story. Usually things just get lost and don't get found. When you lose something, you have that doomsday feeling. We’ve seen it all before: you submit a claim, call, email, and follow up. People aren’t usually lucky. At Boomerang, Skyler is trying to flip the narrative. Boomerang is imagining a world in which when someone loses something, they can feel optimistic because they’re going to get it back.

When someone loses something, every process is different. One company says to email them, one has a typed form, and another says to call their support team. There isn't an 800-pound gorilla of lost and found. Boomerang wants to get businesses like event spaces, hotels, and airlines to leverage sophisticated and modern technology, and to have their customers be able to submit a claim on a website in a seamless way. Boomerang updates customers on the status of that so that they don't have to waste time picking up the phone.?

Why is this happening now?

Over the past few years, a lot of in-person businesses lost a lot of clients due to the pandemic.? Companies went down to a very thin skeleton of what they used to be because their customers were not physically there. With the pandemic starting to slow, everything has been swinging back faster than expected, and businesses weren’t able to accommodate well enough to wow their customers like they used to.?

A lot of companies look at Boomerang as a chance to wow their customers. When someone loses something, they often don’t expect to get it back. It’s a magical moment when someone is able to say, “Your item is on the way back. Here’s the shipping information.” This rings true especially in the travel industry, where some airlines are misplacing 1 out of every 10 bags. That’s a lot of customers who have had their entire travel experience ruined because their bag didn’t make it. Bags that have been missing for months on end also cost airlines lots of money.

Businesses are now seeking touchpoints of where they're falling short in customer experiences, and they want to fix it. Skyler believes that Boomerang is a timely product not only for the travel industry, but also for restaurants, offices, universities, and event venues, just to name a few. Looking at the year ahead, in-person businesses are wondering how they can elevate their game. Boomerang fits well within their tech stack.

How will our world be changed by Boomerang in the next 5-10 years?

When you lose something, you have to think of all the places you’ve been. Imagine a day in which you travel. You hop in an Uber, go through the airport, and then arrive at another, and then take another Uber, and end up at a hotel or an office building. There are multiple places along the way where you could’ve lost something.?

Boomerang imagines a day in which they’ve partnered with all of those places, and customers can submit claims across all of them. Boomerang can do all the search work and update customers in the morning. Skyler says that when he closes his eyes, he imagines a world in which submitting claims to lost and found are as easy as that—and where finding a lost item only requires one seamless touchpoint.

How are you reimagining yourself as a leader this year?

Growing up, Skyler was a quarterback and learned how “you have to lead the team and rally everyone together, and get everyone to work as a unit to achieve and perform well. Everyone has to know the playbook. If one person doesn’t know the playbook, it throws off the whole play.”?

Skyler has always been fascinated by effective leadership, from football players to CEOs to philosophers. He loves learning from other people and wants to continue to evolve and grow with the company. He also points out that at different stages of a company, people require different kinds of leadership.?

“It’s a muscle you have to keep working on,” he says. A sign of a good leader is a successful company culture where everyone has bought in on the vision and is able to accomplish what they’ve set out to accomplish.

Follow GGV Capital to tune into more Reimagined conversations!

*Special thanks to my colleagues?Amy Chen ?and?Megan Tung ?who made this come to life!