It is astonishing, the contents of the boxes stacked on the turquoise shelves of this hangar in Leipzig: a cassette by the Slovenian accordionist Slavko Avsenik sits alongside the book Know, love and heal your inner child or the D's Brain Training Programr Kawashima, a game for the Nintendo DS.
This hangar is the shipping center of Momox, the online commerce platform [allemande] specializing in second-hand cultural products. Some 150,000 “new” items arrive here every day. There they receive a label with a barcode and are placed in boxes among the 15 million items in stock, depending on the space available. Internally, we call it “chaotic storage” – and, and.
On the ruins of a flagship of the VPC
This warehouse was built after the fall of the wall by the Quelle company, on the site of the former Leipzig airport, of which today only the control tower built in the 1920s remains, which is slowly falling into ruin. . In 2009, the German mail order flagship, known for its thick catalogs, also declined and went bankrupt.
Two years later, Momox moved into the hangar, and the curtains or new waffle irons gave way to second-hand items: books, CDs, cassettes, video games, second-hand clothes… From now on, orders are carried out online, on the Medimops and Momox fashion sites [Momox shop en France]. The company now claims 45 million customers, most of them in Germany, but also in France and Italy.
Rapid growth
The second-hand market is booming. According to a Statista consumer survey, 18% of Germans bought second-hand books, DVDs, CDs or video games last year, and 22% bought clothes [64 % des Français ont acheté au moins un produit d’occasion en 2024].
Sales of second-hand products generated more than 15 billion euros in turnover in 2023 in the country, including nearly 350 million at Momox alone. This individual company founded in 2004 by Berliner Christian Wegner has experienced
Related News :