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Abby Nawrocki spent her career inside the warehouses of Zara, Apple, and SKIMS, watching the same problem play out everywhere she worked: companies had world-class systems for buying, storing, and selling inventory, but nothing for what happens once it stops selling.

In 2024 she built Stock, a Chicago-based marketplace that connects brands and 3PLs with nonprofits to donate excess inventory instead of dumping or liquidating it.

Here's our conversation:

AN: The moment wasn't just at Shopify or Flexport, it was across my entire career in fulfillment. I spent years running warehouses and distribution networks for brands like Zara, Apple, SKIMS, and thousands of Shopify merchants. No matter how sophisticated the company was, excess inventory always existed.

What surprised me wasn't that inventory became excess. It's that once it did, there was no infrastructure to move it. Companies had world-class systems for buying inventory, storing inventory, and selling inventory but when inventory stopped being useful, the process became spreadsheets, emails, favors, and disposal.

I realized this wasn't a niche problem. It was a massive infrastructure gap hiding inside supply chains. When every warehouse I operated had the same issue regardless of industry, scale, or sophistication, I knew it was big enough to build a company around.

AN: First, you have the obvious costs: storage, labor, inventory carrying costs, and insurance.

Then you have the hidden costs:

For a 3PL, excess inventory is even worse because it's often someone else's product consuming their most valuable resource: space.

I've seen brands spend more managing excess inventory than the inventory itself is worth. The real cost isn't the pallet fee, it's the operational drag it creates throughout the entire supply chain.

AN: I think we're entering a period where more inventory is being created than ever before.

The barriers to launching a brand have collapsed. Today, anyone can start a business with a Shopify store, a manufacturer, a 3PL, and a few social media ads. That's created an incredible wave of entrepreneurship, but it's also created more products, more SKUs, and more inventory entering the market than at any point in history.

The reality is that most of those brands won't survive.

At the same time, even successful brands are carrying more complexity than ever. They're launching more products, testing more channels, expanding internationally, and trying to forecast increasingly unpredictable consumer demand.

So you have two trends happening simultaneously: existing brands are creating more excess inventory, and new brands are entering the market at a record pace, many of which eventually fail.

That's why I don't view excess inventory as a cyclical problem. It's a structural byproduct of modern commerce. As long as entrepreneurship continues to grow and brands continue to prioritize availability over stockouts, the volume of excess inventory will keep increasing.

That's exactly why we believe the opportunity is so large. We're not solving a temporary inefficiency we're building infrastructure for a problem that is becoming a permanent part of the global supply chain.

AN: For us, it was actually the nonprofit side.

Most people assume nonprofits all operate similarly, but they're incredibly diverse. A national organization with dozens of distribution centers operates very differently than a local shelter serving a single community.

Every nonprofit has different needs, different capacity constraints, different transportation capabilities, different staffing levels, and different levels of logistics sophistication.

Some can absorb 50 pallets tomorrow. Others can only take two pallets next month. Some have warehouse space and forklift operators. Others are entirely volunteer-run and have no ability to receive freight without support.

What we quickly realized is that the challenge wasn't finding nonprofits that wanted inventory. The demand is virtually endless. The challenge was building the infrastructure to understand exactly what each organization could accept, where they could accept it, how quickly they could move it, and what resources they had available.

That's why we spent so much time building and vetting our nonprofit network. We had to become experts in nonprofit operations, logistics capabilities, intake processes, and geographic coverage.

The marketplace only works because we've done the hard work of understanding the incredible diversity that exists on the nonprofit side. That's what turns what looks like a donation into a reliable logistics solution.

AN: If you're building a consumer app, you probably belong in San Francisco. If you're building media, maybe New York. But if you're building supply chain infrastructure, it's hard to find a better place than Chicago.

Nearly every major logistics company has a significant presence here. The country's freight, warehousing, rail, and distribution networks all converge in the Midwest. The people making decisions about inventory, transportation, fulfillment, and warehouse operations are here.

More importantly, Chicago gave me the experience that led to Stock. My career wasn't spent sitting in conference rooms talking about supply chains. It was spent inside warehouses, distribution centers, and fulfillment operations solving real problems at scale. The operators, customers, and partners that helped shape this business are here.

And frankly, I think the next generation of great logistics companies will come from places like Chicago. The world doesn't need another company optimizing clicks. It needs companies solving physical infrastructure problems.

Stock exists because excess inventory is a supply chain problem, and there's no better place in the world to build a supply chain company than Chicago.

AN: I became a mother very young, right as I was starting my career. 23 years old. 

A lot of people see those two things as competing forces, but for me they've always been deeply connected.

Becoming a mother at the beginning of my professional journey gave me a level of empathy that I don't think I would have developed otherwise. Very early on, I learned that everyone is carrying something you can't see. People are navigating families, health issues, financial pressures, relationships, and responsibilities outside of work. That perspective has made me a more compassionate leader and has shaped how I build teams.

At the same time, motherhood forced me to become incredibly efficient.

When you're balancing a career and young children, you don't have the luxury of wasting time. You learn quickly that being busy isn't the same as being productive. You become ruthless about prioritization. You focus on what actually moves the needle and let go of things that don't.

Honestly, a lot of the traits that have helped me as a founder were sharpened through motherhood: prioritization, resilience, adaptability, operating under uncertainty, making decisions with imperfect information, and staying calm when everything feels urgent.

It's also shaped how I recruit. I care far more about outcomes than optics. I don't care who is sitting at a desk at 8 PM. I care whether we're solving problems, serving customers, and building a great company. Some of the highest-performing people I've ever worked with are parents because they've learned how to maximize every hour they have.

And finally, becoming a mother changed how I think about the mission itself. When you have children, you start thinking in decades instead of quarters. You think about the world they're inheriting. You think differently about waste, resource allocation, and impact.

Co-authored by Landon Campbell and Tony Coglianese of CBRE

For years, the narrative was simple: if you wanted to build or scale a tech company, you went to SF or NYC.

That's changing fast and Chicago is one of the biggest beneficiaries.

Tony Coglianese has spent the last seven years advising high-growth companies on where and how to plant their flags in this market. What he's seeing right now is different. Companies aren't opening Chicago offices as an afterthought. They're making long-term bets.

Some of the most important tech companies in the world are leading the way.

Salesforce planted its flag with a 57-story regional headquarters housing over 1,000 employees. Google went even further, acquiring the Thompson Center and preparing to move approximately 2,000 employees into the heart of downtown by 2027. Meta continues to maintain its largest Midwest footprint here, even amid broader cost-cutting.

And it's not just the incumbents.

The next generation of AI and enterprise tech companies is choosing Chicago as their strategic home and the list is growing fast.

Harvey, Legore, OpenAI, Cyera, DataDog, Databricks, Snowflake and Gong all have a presence here. PsiQuantum is building what could become the country's first quantum supercomputer in Illinois. Mindset AI chose Chicago over coastal hubs for its first US office. Zero Hash and Ocient, both backed by coastal capital, are scaling operations locally.

This isn't random.

Chicago offers something increasingly hard to find on the coasts: deep technical talent, lower operating costs, and a central position across the industries: finance, logistics, legal, healthcare, where AI is having its biggest impact. Companies building real businesses, not just chasing hype cycles, recognize that. Tony has watched it play out deal by deal, including leading the two largest corporate relocations in Illinois history.

In the last three years alone, Tony's team has been responsible for nearly half of all Chicago deals over 100,000 square feet and close to 40% of every square foot transacted in the tech sector.

For founders and operators, this creates a different kind of opportunity. You can work on globally important products while being embedded in one of the most economically diverse cities in the country.

Chicago isn't trying to compete with the coasts anymore.

It's becoming the alternative.

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