Hector Rivas founded EcoGoodz in 2012 in Issaquah, Washington. EcoGoodz is a wholesale brokerage firm that sources excess and secondhand consumer goods from charitable organizations across the United States and sells them in bulk to wholesale buyers across the globe.

The company grew directly out of Rivas’s work at ThriftBooks, where he built the procurement model from scratch by partnering with Goodwill, the Salvation Army, Value Village, and other charitable organizations nationwide. At ThriftBooks, Rivas sourced only books. But he consistently observed surplus clothing, shoes, and household goods sitting in excess at those same organizations — inventory that had nowhere to go.

When Rivas left ThriftBooks he leveraged those existing charity relationships to source a new category of product. Value Village committed five container loads of clothing per month as his first customer. Supply was not the problem. Finding buyers was.

Rivas spent the next six months traveling the world — Guatemala, Malaysia, Chile, Peru, Costa Rica, China, and beyond — building the wholesale buyer network that EcoGoodz runs on today. The model is straightforward: buy in bulk from charities, sell in bulk to wholesale buyers across Central and South America, Asia, the Middle East, and dozens of markets worldwide, keeping usable goods out of landfills and in the hands of consumers who need them.