Thibaud Hug de Larauze, CEO of Back Market: “We want to be the French people’s preferred point of contact for reconditioned goods”

Les Numériques – You are celebrating 10 years of Back Market. In France, it has been perhaps 5-6 years since reconditioned products began to gain popularity. Have you felt a change in recent years?

Thibaud Hug de Larauze – Yes, when we launched Back Market in November 2014, the word “reconditioned” didn’t even exist in the dictionary, it was industry jargon. In the first years, we believed in it a lot, but on smaller scales. Reconditioning, in reality, has been around for decades. Repairers have been doing crafts, in the noble sense of the term, for a long time.

Bringing all these products together in the same places is what allowed Back Market to have a global impact. Then, the network effect and word of mouth came into play. In 2014, the refurbished market represented 5% of the mobile sector. Over the last 12 months, it’s 30%. We grow together with our collaborators.

You recently joined forces with Bouygues Telecom to sell refurbished mobiles with packages, but also with Ecosystem to encourage the recycling of smartphones, and with Ducretet for diploma training. You are now far from being just a marketplace. Why this diversification?

THDL – We want to be the preferred point of contact for the French on reconditioned goods and beyond. Offer answers to questions like: “what do I do with my old tech product?” or “where can I buy a trusted refurbished tech product” ? Our obsession is to retrieve the phone from the drawers in three clicks. The model of marketplace is the right one to change things at scale.

Then, the partnership with Bouygues Telecom is structural. The majority of people buy their new terminal and a large number do so by turning to their telephone operator, because the subsidy model makes them “free”. This is a huge financial boost. This model did not exist on the reconditioned market. By applying this subsidy scheme to our refurbished terminals, we are lowering the price of the phones even further.

At the start of 2024, a host of testimonies reported problems with Back Market’s after-sales service. Have you made any changes since then?

THDL – The simple answer is yes. What happened was that in January we experienced a spike in dissatisfied customers who fell into two categories.

The first concerned delivery problems. In these cases, we asked users to go to the police station to report their package lost. This was a necessary step due to a huge spike in fraud that cost Back Market millions. I think we went too far at that point. We therefore tried to readjust this satisfaction/security balance.

The second category was warranty issues. There were products that broke (especially on the rear shell) even though they had not suffered significant impacts. At that time, our after-sales service process was not adequate to manage this type of problem. So we changed all of that, because there was abuse from some merchants (whom we have since removed from the platform). Today, when there is breakage or breakage, 100% of cases are handled internally at the Back Market lab, where the satisfaction rate is much higher.

At the same time, mystery orders (or Back Market gauges the quality of products by playing the average customer Editor’s note.) and the ranking algorithm make it possible to greatly reduce the presence of poor quality products on the platform.

You have launched a Quality Pact and a new Premium label intended to guarantee the good quality of reconditioned products. Why not join the RecQ label, already set up by the industry?

Alexandre Tanay, public affairs manager at Back Market – Our new offer is not exactly a label, it is a ranking specific to the platform. Concerning RecQ, we did not take part because there are several labels in competition and several projects developed in parallel (in 2022, the government assured that it wanted to launch a label supposed to ensure the “readability and confidence in reconditioned products”Editor’s note.) We do not yet know what the final rules will be. There are also some things missing from the RecQ label, in our opinion.

Are you nevertheless in favor of stricter supervision of the reconditioned market?

THDL – Of course we are in favor of it. To make this mode of consumption a standard, the quality of the products must be the same as new ones, and this requires being strict. Our philosophy is to start from consumer expectations, but we want it to be done at the highest possible level, to be recognized at the state and European level! We want it to be transparent, recognized by all and raise quality.

We have seen electronics brands take a (forced) turn towards repairability. Do you think they are doing enough? Are there still challenges to the democratization of repair and reconditioning?

THDL – I consider that overall this is very good news. They finally realized that products can be repaired. The Repair mode of iOS 18 allows, for example, to remove the anxiety-provoking alert that appears when you change one part of the phone for another. This is good, but it is still completely insufficient.

Serialization becomes less of a problem, but the problems persist. We see this through recovery programs, for example. Locking via iCloud is a dead loss because the refurbisher can’t do anything with it. I understand the safety issues on this subject, but it is not normal to have to throw away a product that has cost 150 kg of CO2.