When the Old Way No Longer Feels Right

Nic Esposito Circa OS August 1, 2026

On Christmas night in 2020, I climbed into the car after dinner with my extended family and started the drive home. It should have been a peaceful holiday ride. Instead, I was gripping the steering wheel and thinking about what was packed behind me.

The trunk was full of toys.

They had been given with love, but as any parent knows, children can only play with so many things. Some would become favorites. Others would soon be forgotten, pushed into the basement or eventually carried to a thrift store.

I could already see the familiar cycle unfolding. We buy things, use them for a while, run out of room and then try to figure out what to do with everything we no longer need.

The gifts weren’t the problem. The usual way of doing things simply no longer felt right.

At the time, I had just completed my work as Philadelphia’s Zero Waste and Litter Director and was preparing to cofound Circular Philadelphia, an organization focused on building a stronger circular economy. Yet there I was, facing the same problem as every other parent with an overflowing toy box.

We could store the toys, give them away or take them to a thrift store. Those were reasonable choices, but I couldn’t stop wondering if there was another way.

What if parents could get the toys their children wanted without permanently adding more things to their homes? What if toys could move easily from one childhood to another instead of spending years in a basement?

That Christmas drive became the beginning of Unless Kids.

Finding Another Way

My collaborator, Blake Carroll, and I created Unless Kids to make buying and returning preowned toys feel as easy as shopping online for new ones.

Parents selected toys from our website and placed them into a digital “toy chest.” We delivered their choices directly to their homes. When a child outgrew a toy or lost interest in it, the parent could return to the site and choose something different. During the next delivery, we brought the new toys and collected those the family no longer wanted.

New toys came in. Old toys went out. Children had something new to discover, parents regained some space and the toys continued on to another home.

We weren’t trying to convince families to stop buying toys. We were creating a different way for them to enjoy those toys without repeating the same cycle of clutter and waste.

Unless Kids grew throughout Philadelphia, and interest began spreading across the region. Parents responded because it solved a problem they had felt but didn’t always know how to name.

Then we discovered a problem of our own.

When the Available Tools Don’t Fit

From the customer’s perspective, Unless Kids felt simple. Behind the scenes, it was anything but simple.

Every toy had to be received, identified, evaluated, priced, photographed, listed, stored, delivered and sometimes returned to begin the process again. Each toy was unique, with its own condition and value.

Most traditional retail systems were designed for large quantities of identical new products. They weren’t built for resale businesses managing one-of-a-kind items from many different homes.

The available tools expected us to operate like a traditional retailer, but resale doesn’t operate like traditional retail.

Once again, the old way didn’t fit.

We could have forced our business into a system that wasn’t designed for it. Instead, we returned to the question that had started Unless Kids.

What if there were another way?

Building What Was Missing

We began by creating a better process for toy intake. That solution eventually became CircaOS, a resale operations platform designed to manage preowned, one of a kind inventory.

CircaOS captured product information, applied our pricing rules, created online and in store listings, tracked individual items and connected with our point-of-sale system.

Intake became faster. Pricing became more consistent. Team members spent less time searching for information and more time serving customers.

We built the technology because Unless Kids needed it. But we soon recognized that we weren’t the only ones trying to make old systems perform work they were never designed to do.

Consignment, thrift and resale stores face this challenge every day. Whether they sell clothing, furniture, sporting goods, luxury accessories or household items, every unique product must be evaluated, priced, listed and tracked before it can be sold.

Store owners have built successful businesses using experience, instinct and determination. But determination shouldn’t have to compensate for technology that doesn’t understand resale.

Following the Bigger Opportunity

By 2025, we were running a consumer toy business while developing technology with the potential to serve resale businesses across the country. We cared about both, but we couldn’t give each one the attention it deserved.

After the 2025 holiday season, we made the difficult decision to pause Unless Kids and focus on growing CircaOS.

It was hard to step away from a service our customers valued. But Unless Kids had shown us something bigger. The opportunity wasn’t only to move toys between Philadelphia families. It was to give resale businesses better tools to keep more products in circulation everywhere.

Unless Kids wasn’t a failed experiment or a detour. It allowed us to see what was missing.

Innovation doesn’t always begin with a grand idea. Sometimes it begins with an ordinary problem and the realization that the way we’ve always done something no longer works or feels right.

The resale industry was built by people who understand that. They look at an item someone else has finished using and see remaining value. They look at an old problem and imagine another way forward.

Finding the NARTS community has made our work even more meaningful because its members have been seeing possibilities others overlook for decades.

The future of resale will belong to those willing to ask: Does it have to be done the old way, or is there a better way waiting to be built?