Refunds in hours, not days

Vela had built a returns policy people actually trusted: fair, specific, a little generous where it counted. The problem was that fairness lived entirely in people's heads and hands. Every request moved through the same manual queue, and as orders grew, the queue grew faster than the team ever could. What started as a point of pride was turning into the company's most reliable source of one-star reviews. The work here wasn't to replace that judgment with a blunt automation; it was to encode it, so the policy Vela already believed in could finally run at the speed its customers expected.