Back Market is challenging consumer culture and our obsession with ‘new’ by introducing ‘sex appeal’ and a challenger mindset to the second-hand device market. Launched in 2014, the online marketplace was valued at $5.7bn from a funding round in January 2022, which made it the most valuable startup in France. Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Vianney Vaute talks to eatbigfish about their irreverent character, why brands need enemies and the value of ‘sabotage’ to the organisation.

Vianney Vaute, Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer. Photo: Back Market

What are the origins of the company?

The origin of Back Market starts in the mind of Thibaud Hug de Larauze, the CEO. He worked at a marketplace integrator company that allows any seller to plug itself into eBay, Amazon, and all those big marketplaces and avoid dealing with individual inventories. It was there that Thibaud came across a new kind of seller: a refurbishing company, and he was curious enough to visit this new client located quite romantically in this big warehouse in the middle of nowhere in France. Inside were dozens of product lines and dust-free rooms to change screens, with technicians dressed like they’re from 2001 Space Odyssey. A year later, I had the chance to visit the same company, and that’s when I realised how much is lost between the level of know-how and expertise in the refurbishing process and what consumers see on eBay and general marketplaces. Thibaud convinced Quentin, a developer in the same marketplace integrator company, to join as co-founder, and we decided to build a platform to aggregate those sellers and promote their devices as an exciting alternative to new device consumption.

What is the company’s mission?

Our internal motto is ‘hardware forever’, which is how can we try to bring immortality to the world of machines — that’s the dream. We want those machines to live forever in one shape or another and try to make them last as long as possible. If you asked me five years ago, our mission then was simply about bringing revolution to the world of new. But little by little, you can’t be this angsty adolescent brand that just wants to burn churches. You must explain what religion will replace the old one. You’re very literate in this idea of whether to be a maverick brand that exists to bring chaos or a missionary brand trying to create a future that has a shape, but we have lived this transition internally. At first, we were angsty peeps wanting to be very radical, but then we realised that actually, we are shaping the alternative, and the consumer has to know our vision for the future.

Back Market OOH campaign. Credit: Koto Studio

What did you see as the opportunity for a challenger in the refurb space?

I was excited to bring all the beautiful and impactful creativity, talent and craft that went into the client work I was doing with big brands in my previous role at BETC to a re-consumption project. We were not looking at sobriety per se — we didn’t want to tell the consumer not to take any pleasure from the act of consumption, but I wanted to provide the same excitement and sex appeal for structurally more virtuous devices than new ones. Whether it’s travel, fashion or the energy industry, the mindset of consumers has evolved radically, and people are questioning the old school model’s limits and looking for solutions. Hundreds of entrepreneurs have launched alternatives in each of these categories, but, to me, one category has been untouched: hardware, the machines’ manufacturer. The refurbished category today is worth $80bn versus $1.3 trillion for new, and one used device is sold for every nine new devices — it’s freaking David versus Goliath, but everyone wants to be David in the story. Being David brings a lot of energy, even from an entrepreneurial standpoint, because you’re not just here to scale your numbers, you know that scaling your numbers in perspective of the new device industry is a revolutionary act. We have an entire narrative beyond numbers that’s specifically more ideological, and we want consumers to wake up and be mindful of the impact of manufacturing on the environment. And also, it’s much more fun to have a big guy to poke. Both creatively and in the day-to-day at the company, poking Apple is a lot of fun, so we should keep doing it.

What are some of the other benefits having a ‘big guy to poke’ brings to an organisation?

At a very early stage, it doesn’t only give you a lot of energy it also provides you with a clear roadmap. Because if you think of them as an enemy that you want to cannibalise, you ask yourself, how can I steal consumers from them? You don’t think about yourself; you ask where is the user today? And why is the user considering those brands? And how can your product offer, features, and experience make the consumer switch to your option? Defining and agreeing on a vision at an early stage can sometimes be tough and having an enemy provides clear steps because you simply want to defeat the guy. At our stage now, I think it helps us to ensure our scaling is collective. The bigger you get, the bigger you feel, and we’ve onboarded 680 Back Makers since our launch. So it’s very different from eight years ago when we were just three peeps. And you can feel heavy and slow, but looking at your enemy, that’s still a freaking giant, you still feel like the dwarf of the story. You might be ten times bigger than two years ago, but you’re still small, so it keeps you in a nimble mindset. It’s a virtue because it keeps you awake and confident relative to the big guys. In the long run, it proves to be very valuable.

Back Market’s ‘Apple-rivalling’ packaging. Credit: Koto Studio

How are you trying to steal consumers from Big Tech?

The first thing is about trust, so the device needs to be functional. New devices are reliable. We estimate that the failure rate for new devices is 2-3% in the warranty period. When we launched Back Market eight years ago and looking at the data from 2017, our failure rate for the machines we were selling was close to 10%. You can deal with a 10% failure rate in two ways, first is to make the after-sales customer experience as good as possible, so we invested in our service. But you also have to work on the root cause of the failure rates and try to decrease the number, and after working intensively and investing a lot, the failure rate fell to 4.3%. So there’s still a lot of room for improvement, and it’s failing twice as often as new, but it’s at a level that’s starting to be admissible. I believe the only way to radically change the category perception is to limit the failure rate as much as possible and provide the best customer experience possible. You can do all the advertising in the world, but if the consumer doesn’t trust you, it’s not going to work. It’s only by making consumers love the experience and talk about this experience with friends and colleagues that we can make the change at scale. You have to walk the talk of quality, and this is what we’ve been doing for eight years, but there is still room for improvement.

And then, in terms of our brand, from day one, we wanted to go into the arena and try to face those giants, using the same weapons as the big guys and win consumers’ hearts. But it’s still a debate internally. The bigger we grow, the more we attract people who join us for ideological reasons, and some of our stakeholders see advertising as dirty and think there are more noble ways to promote our faith. But it’s already an unbalanced battlefield, and if we don’t equip ourselves with the same weapons, we’re not going to win, and we’re certainly not going to win fast enough. As we all know, it’s becoming a matter of urgency in the world in which we live. So we’re using advertising, branding and everything that makes a machine sexy when Apple releases it. We try to copy and paste those techniques and make them ours by promoting the environmental angle that only a brand like ours could do and try to make it a unique selling proposition. But it doesn’t mean we don’t have to do the core of the job, which is to tell the consumer that it’s not because a device is second-hand that it’s rubbish. So we bring high production value in our advertising for our used devices. We maintain a high-quality level in the interfaces selling those devices so that the user trusts the device to be functional but also wants the device. We’ve developed a nice unboxing experience, and we try to mimic everything that makes new so exciting and translate it for the world of second-hand. The core responsibility of our brand is to reignite the sex appeal of devices that Apple told you were super desirable three years ago, but somehow they made you forget that iPhone 11 was the next big thing because you must now focus on the iPhone 13 Green edition.

How has the brand identity and experience developed over time?

The first function is to bring back sex appeal for used devices. And when I say that, it makes it very caricature. But when we launched eight years ago, the only way to find these devices was on the neutral and crappy interfaces of Amazon and eBay, or on scary territories, like peer-to-peer marketplaces like Craigslist. The very act of putting refurbished devices on clean and functional interfaces was simple but quite radical at the time. And then, we try to translate this same level of crafting into our communication assets, our imaging strategy and so on to play the same role. But on top of bringing the sex appeal, something quite natural comes from being the David of the story and challenging the big brands. A lot of what we say to users is kind of defined in counterpoint to how Apple would talk. So from Apple, we try to steal the sex appeal, but everything else we do in our own way. Because Apple is so focused on the machines, naturally, we want to connect with users more from a human-to-human perspective. The big tech brands are not the funniest on earth, so we want to bring a little salt and humour to the conversation. The big brands are so desperate to sell the latest device and make a huge drama for every product launch, so we can be the brand that says, at the end of the day, it’s just an iPhone. So there is a little nonchalance towards the device, and we’re not desperate to sell the latest one. Our personality came simply from being a counterpoint to the established brands. We’re the only challenger in the category, so it was super-natural to bring this vibe to the editorial strategy, the UX copy, etc. And users love that we’re breaking the routine they have with those boring manufacturers or distributors. It’s very cheap — it doesn’t cost you anything to use a word versus another one. But the effect on consumers’ hearts is massive.

There’s a brilliant example of Back Market’s humour through a link to a Wikipedia page about Deep-fried Mars bars on your website. What was the thinking behind that?

There’s nothing more boring than the footer of a website, right? Nobody scrolls down that far, and so I thought, why not add a little signature to it. In France, we linked to a Wikipedia page on Nana Mouskouri, who is an old-school Greek singer from the 70s and 80s. My grandmother was a big fan of hers, and we would listen to them whenever I went there. So alongside ‘contact us’ and our product links, we link to information on Nana Mouskouri. It was just a bit of fun, but it’s become one of Back Market’s biggest talking points. The challenge is translating it into the different geographies; for the UK, it was a deep-fried Mars bar. You would not believe the amount of debate we have when we launch into a new country.

That’s interesting because so much of the conversation around designing online experiences is about being frictionless, isn’t it? But you’re intentionally creating moments of friction?

Yes, one of our design principles is to wake up users. The goal of UX is to close the sale, and to do that in our current world, you have to do that in the most efficient process. So designers try to zombify the user to keep just clicking next until check-out. But it’s kind of schizophrenic because we also want to wake the user up and remind them that they’re here and not on another website, so intentionally providing small accidents for our users is actually an important part of our designers’ thinking.

We ran a test recently for a few thousand users, at the end of our check-out process, just a little check-in before you check out, where we asked if they really need this device? And people love that we’re simply providing a pause moment. It creates friction, but people are smart, right? It’s not because you ask them a question that suddenly they decide to leave your website and not consider buying it anymore. You have to trust the user enough to establish a relationship that goes beyond a simple transaction.

Back Market’s value of ‘Sabotage!’ on the walls of its Bordeaux offices.

Back Market has grown rapidly in a short time; what lessons can you share from having to scale quickly whilst keeping the team together and focused on the mission?

It’s funny because, in the early days, I didn’t focus much internally on keeping people engaged and focused as I thought that if we do our job on the consumer side, then the people who join will feel the vibe and just get in line with it. But there is a moment after onboarding between 20 and 30 people when you realise there can be misalignment and people are not always looking in the same direction or sharing the same energy. You start to need words crafted and dedicated to the internal audience, as the words used externally are not enough to keep you aligned. We ran a workshop and worked on our values, and I was extremely afraid of the amount of bullshit I thought would come out of this kind of exercise, but I was proved wrong at every level. We had 20-25 Back Makers at the time, and it was actually very moving to hear why everyone joined, and although people had different reasons, we were broadly aligned. Initially, we tried to make all these different views click together, and we ended up with those bullshit phrases — the material was not bullshit, but we’d juxtapose the different words people used, and we ended up with values and sentences that didn’t really mean anything. We returned a few months later, and I took a different approach. Instead of trying to agree on long sentences with some of everyone’s views in, we tried to reach the common denominator and agree on just one word or value that would sum us up.

We agreed on the notion of ‘Sabotage’ which I love because it says three things:

It’s a word of action, and we feel like we have this energy to always want to do something.
It says that we have an enemy, and we’re here to sabotage the new device industry by renewing devices and putting them back on the market.
It says we need a particular mindset and behaviour, which is about the relationship we need to have with the resources we have at our disposal. We’re here to explode the bridge, but we have just three people and one stick of dynamite, how can we be street smart enough to make it happen?

A lot of our behaviours came out of this notion of sabotage, and still today, it’s something that we use as a value — as our single value actually, years later, when we are over six hundred people. I don’t know how long it’ll last, but it’s proved to be valuable.

You mention, as a saboteur, needing to work with constraints of resources. Can you share an experience of Back Market embracing a constraint and using it as an opportunity?

Self-doubt is a constraint, and there are moments when I feel like maybe we should tone it down and try to be a little more universal. You can have moments of arrogance looking at the companies that preceded you and thinking that they’re lame, but you can quickly become one of those. And there's been times where we took options not fitting our challenger DNA — out of safety or because of a fascination with our bigger competitors. Even as a co-founder, I have moments of doubt before buying an idea. For example, we recently ran a social campaign called Hack Market, where we used Airdrop technology to promote Back Market on model displays and people’s iPhones inside Apple Stores on Earth Day. It was fun, and we were doing it smartly, so legally speaking, we were not breaking the law. But it was provocative, and I didn’t feel confident enough to agree to the idea on my own when it was pitched. I wanted to do it, but I had to sit down with Thibaud, the CEO, and ask him what he thought. Thibaud always pushes for the risk, strangely enough; usually, it’s the brand guy who has to make the case for braver communication. The more I think about it, the more I realise that maybe there is only one person in the company that can impulse these ideas and work against the risk-averse culture that emerges as we scale, and that’s the CEO. He has the legitimacy of knowing the company, knowing the shareholders better than I do and has kept us pushing. Without Thibaud’s energy and attitude, I’m not sure I would have built the same brand.

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Images courtesy of Back Market

‘Scaling our numbers is a revolutionary act’: Back Market co-founder Vianney Vaute