Don Carli On Tuning What We See Online To Reduce eCommerce Returns

About this episode

Don Carli discusses the impact of metamerism on eCommerce returns and how existing standards can help reduce waste.

$850 billion . That's what retail and e-commerce returns will cost in 2026, generating 8.4 billion pounds of landfill waste — and a surprising share of it involves products that worked perfectly. They just didn't look the way people expected. About 22% of consumers return items because the product looked different in person than it did online, and for home goods and textiles, that number climbs higher. The culprit has a name: metamerism — the way colors shift under different light sources, so the navy sectional and the matching throw pillow that looked identical on your screen clash under your living room LEDs. Don Carli , founder of Nima Hunter and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, joins Sustainability In Your Ear to explain why this keeps happening and what it would take to stop it. The fix isn't a moonshot. The relevant standards — glTF for digital rendering and ICC Max for physical material appearance — already exist and were designed to be connected. Digital textile printing already makes it possible to produce fabrics with pigment recipes that match under any lighting condition, not just one. What's missing is coordination: brands…

People in this episode

Host: Mitch Ratcliffe

Guest: Don Carli

Topics covered

• eCommerce
• returns
• metamerism
• sustainability
• digital rendering
• consumer behavior

Keywords

• eCommerce returns
• metamerism
• sustainability
• digital rendering
• consumer expectations

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Nima Hunter, Institute for Sustainable Communication, Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group

Products: glTF, ICC Max

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