Fast fashion, fast food, fast furniture, fast tech. Many consumer industries are built on speed and scale, overproducing and racing through trends at a breakneck pace—often with destructive consequences.
When the refurbished tech marketplace Back Market launched in 2014, the tech industry was on the brink of this runaway cycle of consumption, profit, and environmental impact. Apple had just released the iPhone 6 Plus, Instagram was taking its first steps, and wearables were a brand-new idea. But Back Market’s co-founders—Thibaud Hug de Larauze, Quentin Le Brouster, and Vianney Vaute—could see where things were headed and were determined to find a different path.
“We’ve always met humanity’s needs by producing and consuming more, but resources are finite, so that model doesn’t work,” says CEO Hug de Larauze. “We have to do more with what we already have and stop extracting materials from the earth just to throw them away.”
Their instinct—that circularity could replace linear consumption and reduce waste—proved right. After reaching a $5.7 billion valuation in January 2022, alongside a $530 million Series E funding round, Back Market’s business has taken off. The Paris-based startup has now raised a total of €884.3 million in investment and works with 2,000 sellers worldwide, more than half of them in mainland Europe. The United States is its second-largest market, with 400 sellers, followed by Japan with 330 and the UK with 270. Net sales grew 27% over the past year, while overall gross merchandise value rose 32% to $3.5 billion for the full year 2025. According to Back Market, sales of refurbished smartphones in Europe grew by 10% annually between 2017 and 2023, while sales of new devices fell by 4% over the same period.
There are lessons in Back Market’s rise for the fashion industry. As Hug de Larauze notes, Back Market helped lobby for progressive circular fashion regulations across the European Union—a challenge fashion is still facing—and its retail approach tackles displacement rates in a way few circular fashion companies have managed.
Then there’s the marketing: a witty, nostalgic pitch that goes beyond sustainability to attract budget-minded consumers longing for simpler technology. One poster for a classic iPod reads, “Comebacks aren’t exclusive to Liam and Noel.” Another, for a refurbished phone, says, “Text your naughty list, for less.” A Henry vacuum cleaner is described as “an ’80s icon you won’t find any dirt on.”
In September, Back Market hosted the first Slow Tech Uprising Summit in Paris, bringing together speakers from Depop, Vestiaire Collective, and Vinted to explore how to grow the circular economy. It was a rare case of cross-industry collaboration—and a clear statement of intent from 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, much like circular fashion, must attract sellers for inventory, build customer trust, and try to break the cycle of constant 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 not long ago, circularity was still a novel idea, and mainstream adoption seemed like a distant dream for platforms like Vinted (now France’s largest retailer by sales volume) and eBay (which is set to acquire Depop).Back Market was acquired for $1.2 billion in cash. The fashion resale market is largely made up of peer-to-peer platforms, which often struggle with scams, high markups, and poor communication between buyers and sellers—as highlighted by the Instagram account @DepopDrama—undermining trust in the process. According to Hug de Larauze, Back Market took a different approach, partly because refurbished tech products come with higher price tags.
In the UK, the average Back Market order is between £350 and £400, much higher than typical secondhand fashion sales. Customers also have higher expectations for tech products—items like smartphones, laptops, and earphones need to be reliable for daily use. While many fashion resale platforms have invested in optional authenticity guarantees to build trust, Back Market has to go further by taking a more hands-on role in sales. Instead of operating peer-to-peer, Back Market works exclusively with professional refurbishers. New refurbishers can list up to five products per day for 40 days before their listings are paused. A seller success manager then reviews their performance data, customer feedback, and how well their products meet Back Market’s quality standards. If the quality isn’t up to par, they can no longer sell on the platform.
Hug de Larauze says that professionalizing sellers and offering a 12-month warranty on refurbished products goes back to the basics of retail. “Without this process, the trust gap is too wide for customers to buy used tech products, which are still quite expensive,” he explains. “We found that many customers were worried about losing their money or getting a product that didn’t work, with no guarantees. So our approach has always been: how do we make this process smoother and make people feel safe shopping secondhand?”
Back Market’s pop-up shop in New York was open from September to December 2025. This was the platform’s first owned physical retail experiment, allowing customers to browse refurbished tech, get expert repairs, and attend special events.
Scaling through strategic partnerships
For Back Market, scaling comes down to supply and demand: securing enough inventory and spare parts to offer a wide range of refurbished tech products, and attracting enough customers to buy them.
On the supply side, Back Market runs Europe’s largest smartphone trade-in program, having collected over a million trade-ins to date. This is where tech and fashion differ. In fashion, brand trade-in programs have faced accusations of greenwashing, largely because customers who trade in old clothes often receive store credit for new items, which fuels the waste crisis these programs claim to address. Additionally, few brands have a viable solution for the textile waste they collect, and much of it ends up in landfills in the Global South. Textile-to-textile recycling could partly solve this, but few brands have committed to supporting innovators in this space with large-scale offtake agreements. The success of Back Market’s trade-in program hinges on this point: when it collects old products, it has a direct use for them.
To access more used products and expand its offerings, Back Market partnered with Sony PlayStation to run its official trade-in program in the US and Europe, with a similar program for smartwatches in development.
Of course, not everything Back Market collects through its trade-in program is fully reusable or in demand as a refurbished product. Like fashion, tech is increasingly trend-driven, and some products need a creative update before customers will buy them. For example, Hug de Larauze notes strong customer interest in customizing smartwatch straps, and Apple itself has collaborated directly with Nike and Hermès. Sometimes, Back Market…The company will add “some extra groove or sense of uniqueness” to refurbished products by including 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 collaborated with Canadian designer Gab Bois on a limited-edition collection made from upcycled tech products. She used spare parts from old phones and computers to create one-off fashion items. The Y2K-inspired collection featured a belt with an old flip phone as the buckle, a crocheted balaclava made from old earphone wires, and press-on nails decorated with components from old phones on a metallic base.
As a digital-native platform, Back Market is now focusing on physical retail to boost demand—a strategy fashion retailers have also tried with mixed results. “Making repair available in real life, near where people live and work, is critical to scaling up,” says Hug de Larauze. In France, Back Market has partnered with telecom giant Bouygues Telecom to offer trade-in and resale services through its network of 500 stores. “The offline world is huge—around 50% of people still buy their tech offline—so we need to be there to reach them. We could do it ourselves, but I prefer partnerships because they allow us to expand faster and target customers at the exact moment they’re making a purchase. It’s really about showing up.”
Codifying Culture Change via Regulations
Many regulations that sustainable fashion advocates hope for also apply to the tech industry. In some areas, like the right to repair and eco-design, tech has been an early adopter, offering lessons for fashion. Back Market played a key role in lobbying for 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 a product’s initial release. “That was a big win and is really enabling repair and refurbishment at scale,” says Hug de Larauze, noting early signs of impact. “Our quality metrics and defective rates have improved massively since then.”
Alongside spare parts availability, regulations also affect how easily products can be disassembled and repaired. One major breakthrough involves batteries: “It’s much easier to replace batteries now. The biggest repairability issue in tech is being able to change the battery easily because batteries inevitably degrade over time. Before, you had to unscrew many screws and unglue the battery, which required pouring alcohol on it and performing a very invasive repair. Now, the battery is housed in a case, and the glue is easier to melt, so refurbishers are less likely to break the phone while replacing the battery.”
The battery issue is similar to fashion’s challenge of keeping shoes in circulation—cobblers often have to buy entire “donor” pairs just to replace the sole on a used pair. However, applying these principles to fashion is far from simple. Regulators have been fine-tuning proposed eco-design rules for years without a clear consensus. While there are common eco-design values across industries—such as improving durability, reusability, upgradability, and reparability—the fashion industry is locked in fierce debates over whether to prioritize natural or synthetic fibers 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 demonstrate is the importance of a collective industry voice and a united lobbying mechanism.Fashion has long grappled with this issue. “To make a product last longer, it must be eco-designed. That means ensuring it is durable, repairable, and easy to recycle or reuse to the fullest extent,” he explains. “I’m very proud of these outcomes, and I believe similar approaches could significantly impact the fashion industry as well.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about how technology can help fashion achieve circularity on a larger scale designed to be clear and conversational
Beginner Definition Questions
1 What does circularity in fashion actually mean
Circularity means designing a system where clothing is used for as long as possible then recycled or regenerated into new products at the end of its life instead of being thrown away Its the opposite of the takemakewaste model
2 How is technology different from just recycling my old clothes
Technology enables circularity at a massive industrial scale While dropping clothes in a bin is a start technology helps track materials automate sorting chemically break down fabrics and create new marketplacesmaking the entire system more efficient and effective
3 Can technology really fix fashions waste problem
Its a crucial tool but not a magic fix Technology enables the systems and scale needed for circularity but it must be combined with better design consumer behavior change and supportive policies to truly transform the industry
Benefits How It Helps Questions
4 Whats the main benefit of using tech for circular fashion
Scale and Efficiency Technology can process sort and analyze millions of garments quickly and accuratelya task impossible to do manuallymaking circular practices viable for large brands and global markets
5 How does tech make resale and repair easier for regular people
Apps and platforms create easytouse marketplaces for buying and selling preowned items Other apps can help you find local repair services access repair guides or even digitally passport your item to prove its authenticity and history
6 Does this just help the environment or are there other benefits
It has multiple benefits
Environmental Less waste pollution and resource extraction
Economic Creates new jobs in recycling repair and recommerce
Consumer Offers more affordable unique and higherquality durable options
Specific Technologies Examples
7 Whats a digital product passport
Think of it as a digital ID tag for your garment A QR code or NFC chip stores info like material composition origin repair instructions and ownership history This helps with resale value proper