Fast fashion, fast food, fast furniture, fast tech. So many consumer industries are predicated on speed and scale, overproducing and churning through new trends at record pace — often to a destructive degree.
When refurbished tech marketplace Back Market launched in 2014, the tech industry stood at the precipice of this careening consumption, profits, and impact. Apple had just released the iPhone 6 Plus, Instagram was in its infancy, and wearables were a brand new concept. But Back Market co-founders Thibaud Hug de Larauze, Quentin Le Brouster and Vianney Vaute could see where the industry was headed, and they were determined to find another way.
“We have always answered the needs of humanity by producing more and consuming more, but resources are limited, so that doesn’t work,” says CEO Hug de Larauze. “We have to do more with what we already have, and stop extracting matters from the earth just to throw them away.”
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Their hunch — that circularity could replace linear consumption and curb waste — was sound. Since securing a $5.7 billion valuation in January 2022 — alongside a $530 million series E funding round — the Back Market business has been booming. The Parisian startup has now racked up a total of €884.3 million in investment, and has two thousand sellers globally, more than half of which are in Mainland Europe. The US is Back Market’s second largest market with 400 sellers, followed by 330 in Japan, and 270 in the UK. Net sales rose 27% in the past year, while overall gross merchandise value (GMV) grew 32% to $3.5 billion for 2025 full year. According to Back Market, refurbished smartphone sales in Europe grew 10% a year between 2017 and 2023, while new device sales declined 4% in the same period.
There are lessons for fashion from Back Market’s rise. As Hug de Larauze explains, Back Market was instrumental in lobbying for progressive circular fashion regulations across the European Union a challenge fashion is currently grappling with — and its retail strategy addresses displacement rate in a way few circular fashion companies have managed.
Then, there’s the marketing — a tongue-in-cheek proposition that goes beyond sustainability, appealing to cost-conscious consumers with a nostalgic craving for simpler tech. “Comebacks aren’t exclusive to Liam and Noel,” proclaims a poster for an old-school iPod. “Text your naughty list, for less,” reads another, for a refurbished phone. A Henry vacuum cleaner is pitched as “an ’80s icon you won’t find any dirt on”.
In September, Back Market hosted the first Slow Tech Uprising Summit in Paris, with speakers from Depop, Vestiaire Collective, and Vinted exploring how to scale the circular economy. It was a rare example of cross-industry collaboration, and a stake in the ground for Hug de Larauze, who says he wants to “make circularity the new normal”. Fashion can learn from the CEO and Back Market’s model, which — just like circular fashion — needs to recruit sellers for inventory, earn trust with customers and try to break the cycle of newness, all while scaling the business.
“We share a lot of practices in common,” says Hug de Larauze. “We have to fight fast fashion and fast tech. We need to keep pushing manufacturers to make their products last as long as possible. We have to keep offering people an alternative to buying new.”
Bridging the “trust gap”
It’s hard to imagine now, but it’s not that long ago that circularity was a novel concept, and mainstream adoption was little more than a pipe dream for the likes of Vinted (now the largest retailer in France by sales volume) and Ebay (which is set to acquire Depop for $1.2 billion in cash). The fashion resale space is dominated by peer-to-peer marketplaces, which have been dogged by scams, high markups and poor communication between buyers and sellers — see Instagram account @DepopDrama — eroding trust in the process. Back Market took a different approach, explains Hug de Larauze, partly necessitated by the higher price tag on refurbished tech products.
In the UK, the average Back Market order value sits between £350 and £400, significantly higher than secondhand fashion sales. Tech products also come with higher customer expectations — in the case of smartphones, laptops and earphones, these are products people need to be able to rely on all day, everyday. So while many fashion resale platforms have invested heavily in optional authenticity guarantees to build trust, Back Market has to go one step further, taking a heavier hand in the sales process. Instead of operating peer-to-peer, Back Market works exclusively with professional refurbishers. When refurbishers are first onboarded, they can sell up to five products per day for 40 days, before the company shuts off their listings. A seller success manager then looks through the data, customer feedback, and how well their work matches Back Market’s quality expectations. If the quality is not right, they can no longer sell on the platform.
Professionalizing the seller base and offering a 12-month warranty on refurbished products goes back to the fundamentals of retail, says Hug de Larauze. “Without this process, the trust gap is too big to expect customers to buy used tech products, which are still pretty expensive,” he explains. “We found that a lot of customers were worried they would lose their money or the product wouldn’t work, and they would have no guarantees. So our approach has always been: how do we make that process cleaner and make people feel safe shopping secondhand?”
Scaling through strategic partnerships
For Back Market, the barriers to scale come down to supply and demand: securing enough inventory and spare parts to offer a wide range of refurbished tech products, and earning enough customers to sell them to.
On the supply side, Back Market runs the largest smartphone trade-in program in Europe, having amassed over a million product trade-ins to date. This is where tech and fashion diverge. In fashion, brands offering trade-in programs have garnered accusations of greenwashing, largely because customers who trade in old garments tend to be rewarded with store credit for new pieces, fueling the waste crisis these programs supposedly exist to counter. Also, few brands have a viable solution for the textile waste they collect, and much has later been found in landfills in the Global South. Textile-to-textile recycling could (partly) solve this, but few brands have been willing to step up and support innovators in this space with commercial-scale offtake agreements. The success of Back Market’s trade-in program hinges on this latter point: when it gathers old products, it has a direct use case for them.
In a bid to reach more used products — and scale its offer across product categories — Back Market inked a partnership with Sony PlayStation to operate its official trade-in program in the US and Europe, with a similar iteration for smartwatches currently in the works.
Of course, not everything Back Market collects via its trade-in program is fully reusable, or desirable as a refurbished product. Just like fashion, tech is increasingly susceptible to trends, and some products require a creative refresh before customers will shop them. Take the smartwatch: Hug de Larauze says there is a strong customer demand for customizing the strap, and Apple itself has done direct collaborations with Nike and Hermès. Sometimes, Back Market will add “some extra groove or sense of uniqueness” while refurbishing these products, by adding a new strap. “There are potential collaborations to be made on that front,” he adds, “to make refurbished or pre-owned sexy.”
At the end of 2024, Back Market also did a collaboration with Canadian designer Gab Bois, where she used spare parts from old phones and computers, to design one-off fashion products. The Y2K-inspired collection included a belt with an old flip phone as the buckle, a crocheted balaclava made from old earphone wires, and a set of press-on nails featuring components of old phones on a metallic base.
When it comes to drumming up demand, Back Market — a digital native platform — has its sights set on physical retail, something fashion retail platforms have also attempted, with varying success. “Making repair available in real life, next to where people live and work, is a critical piece to scale,” says Hug de Larauze. In France, Back Market has partnered with telecom giant Bouygues Telecom to offer trade-in and resale via its 500-strong store network. “The offline world is huge — around 50% of people still purchase their tech offline — so we need to be there to talk to those people. We could do it ourselves, but I like the partnership angle better, because it enables us to be everywhere faster, and it means we’re coming for the exact same active purchase. It’s really about showing up.”
Codifying culture change via regulations
Many of the regulations sustainable fashion has pinned its hopes on also apply to tech, and in some cases — such as the right to repair and eco-design — tech is an early adopter, with lessons for fashion. Back Market was instrumental in lobbying for both of these changes, alongside iFixit and the broader Right to Repair movement in the US and Europe. Now, European manufacturers of smartphones, computers and tablets are legally required to sell spare parts for up to seven years after selling the product new. “That was a big win and is really enabling repair and refurbishment at scale,” says Hug de Larauze, noting the early signs of impact. “Our quality metrics and defective rates have improved massively since then.”
Alongside the availability of spare parts, the regulations also have an impact on how easy it is to disassemble products and actually replace broken parts. One significant breakthrough was batteries: “It’s much easier to replace batteries now. The biggest issue with repairability in tech is being able to change the battery easily, because the battery will inevitably drain over time. Before, you had to unscrew lots of screws and unglue the battery, which meant pouring a lot of alcohol on it, and doing a very invasive repair. Now, the battery is in a case, and it’s easier to melt the glue, so refurbishers are less likely to break the phone trying to replace the battery.”
The battery issue is reminiscent of fashion’s struggle to keep shoes in circulation — cobblers often have to buy whole new “donor” pairs simply to replace the sole on a used pair. But applying this to fashion is far from simple. Regulators have been fine-tuning proposed eco-design rules for years, with no clear consensus in sight. While there are common values for eco-design that apply across industries — improving durability, reusability, upgradability and reparability, for example — the fashion industry has been locked in a fierce debate over whether natural or synthetic fibers should be prioritized, and how brands can continue to invest in creativity within the limits of eco-design, among other issues.
What Back Market’s efforts in tech show is the importance of a collective industry voice and a united lobbying mechanism, something fashion has struggled with in the past. “If you want a product to last longer, you have to eco-design it. That means making sure the product is resilient, repairable and easy to recycle or get the maximum reuse out of,” he says. “I’m very proud of these results, and I think similar policies could have a huge effect in fashion, too.”
