Back Market makes Slow Tech more affordable with three new launches, including The Outlet. Reading Time: 4 mins read At a time when households are undergoing financial pressure, Back Market is challenging the idea that consumers should have to buy the newest device to access reliable technology. At the second annual Slow Tech Summit in Paris today, Back Market announced the launch of The Back Market Outlet, a new lower-cost marketplace for smartphones and MacBooks that are fully functional but have visible cosmetic imperfections, offering greater affordability without compromising on quality or buyer protections. The company also introduced Back Bot and Back Check, two new tools designed to improve the quality, transparency and longevity of refurbished devices. The announcements form part of Back Market's broader response to a technology market increasingly shaped by rising tech inflation and the constant pressure to upgrade. As new devices are promoted around incremental improvements and increasingly expensive gimmicky features, consumers are often being asked to spend more, even when existing tech still works. Back Market's position is simple. The future of technology should not depend on buying new every year. The Back Market Outlet: Benefit from lower prices, with the same peace of mind as buying new Introduced on the main stage by Amandine Durr, chief product officer, Back Market. The Outlet is a new marketplace designed for customers who need reliable technology at the lowest possible price that's fully functional, but can't afford to take the risks associated with second-hand peer-to-peer exchanges. The Outlet, designed to give price-conscious customers an alternative option, offers fully functional refurbished smartphones and MacBooks with visible cosmetic wear. The devices may have scratches and other marks, but the lower prices reflect how they look, not how they perform. Customers will benefit from professional inspection, a one-year warranty, 30 days free returns and Customer Care. Amandine Durr, CPO, Back Market, comments: "The cost of living is putting pressure on every household, while technology companies continue to raise prices, using the upgrade lie to justify another major new purchase. People should not have to choose between having a device they can afford or a device they can trust. The Outlet changes that equation. Customers can accept cosmetic wear without compromising on performance, and still receive the protection and support they expect from a trusted technology platform. The Outlet will initially launch as a proof of concept in France and the United Kingdom, through the Back Market app, with smartphones and MacBooks available at launch. A web experience is planned for later in the year, along with a wider roll-out across core markets. Back Bot: AI-powered robotics to raise refurbishment standards and accelerate circularity. Back Market also unveiled Back Bot, an AI-powered inspection machine developed by Apkudo for Back Market, in partnership with Back Market's Innovation Lab. It is the only technology designed to assess both the functional and cosmetic condition of smartphones and tablets, with support for foldable devices, styluses and headphones to follow. It can support high-volume refurbishment operations, with the capacity to inspect up to 10,000 devices per month. Through its partnership with Apkudo, Back Market reinforces its commitment to developing solutions that support refurbishers upstream, before devices reach the point of sale. Robotics are central to transforming the refurbishment industry, enabling greater standardisation, transparency, control and quality across the entire refurbishment chain, making refurbished devices a more reliable and sustainable alternative to new. For consumers, this means higher quality products, fewer returns and greater confidence when buying refurbished. "Back Market made refurbished easy to buy. Back Bot helps make it easy to trust. A grade backed by consistent measurement, on every device, is how confidence gets built at scale," Josh Matthews, CEO and co-founder, Apkudo Back Check: professional diagnostics built for Mac refurbishment Designed by Back Market Innovation Labs, Back Check is specifically built for professional diagnostic refurbishment workflows, using native macOS software. With the aim of boosting seller performance on quality checks, Back Check will help test devices faster, identify issues that manual testing can miss, and make more accurate functionality testing and pricing decisions. Its capabilities include cell-level battery diagnostics, thermal stress testing, component tracking and visual defect mapping. The tool is designed to deliver comprehensive testing in approximately 5-10 minutes, compared with manual inspection processes. Back Check is entering beta with existing suppliers, testing access and pricing models with early users before a broader rollout. "Slow tech is not about asking people to spend more or settle for less. It is about making better use of the devices already in circulation. With The Outlet, Back Bot and Back Check we are extending that principle across the customer and seller experience: more affordable access, stronger quality process and greater confidence in the refurbished category" Clément Petit, CEO, Back Market Building confidence across the refurbished tech ecosystem Together, the three launches represent Back Market's ambition to make refurbished products more accessible, reliable and transparent. For consumers, The Outlet creates a new way to access functional technology at lower prices whilst retaining the protections associated with a trusted marketplace. For sellers of refurbished products, Back Bot and Back Check provide new tools for standardised testing, identify repair needs, improve grading accuracy and reduce avoidable returns.

The world is getting less circular. What will it take to change that? October 15, 2026 During Climate Week NYC, Bloom ESG and Apkudo brought together professionals from across the electronics value chain for a candid roundtable on circularity. On a Tuesday evening in midtown OEMs,ITADs, demanufacturers, resale marketplaces, environmental market makers and standards bodies, were all in one room. While the evening was held under Chatham House Rule, the conversation was too interesting to keep to ourselves. Here are some of the key highlights from this engaging conversation. Bloom Group is going backwards. When Circle Economy first measured global circularity in 2018, the world was 9.1% circular. The latest Circularity Gap Report puts it at 6.9%. In other words, more than 93% of the materials entering the global economy still come from virgin sources. This value includes the economy's total consumption of materials, ranging from fossil fuels to biomass. By weight, heavy bulk items such as sand and gravel make up the largest share. of the materials entering the global economy still come from virgin sources However, the statistic is still worth pausing on, particularly in the context of the electronics sector. In an era of increasing technological needs across consumer and enterprise applications, Bloom Group wondered: has circularity hit its ceiling? What's holding Bloom Group back. Amongst the table, there was agreement that three bottlenecks prevent true circularity from reaching its potential. Repairability. Too many devices are difficult to repair. Think of an old car: when a part fails, you replace the part. Electronics should work the same way. Alternative sentence: Companies such as Back Market and Fairphone are currently working towards that direction, repair must expand to an industrial scale while remaining easily accessible. Achieving that depends on two things: how devices are repaired, and how they're designed to begin with in the first place. Products are designed to be assembled, not taken apart. Glued batteries, soldered components and ever-smaller devices make it slow and costly to separate parts and materials. When recovery isn't considered at the design stage, too many devices go straight to shredding, because they weren't designed to be easily repaired, harvested or separated. Incentives. The low-carbon value of circularity sits in the wrong place. Until recently, the market lacked a mechanism that allowed the carbon intensity attributes of refurbished hardware to influence buying decisions. Although refurbishers generate significant low-carbon processing outcomes, buyers could not capture or report those attributes when procuring hardware. The SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0, published in June 2026, changes that. Where hyperscalers procure refurbished GPUs directly, an I-TEC(TM) issued against that hardware batch provides the verified emission factor needed to lower the reported carbon intensity of their Scope 3 Category 1 or Category 2 inventory, creating a direct economic incentive to recover and reuse high-value components at scale. These discussions raised a question worth exploring: how does recovery look in the future compared to today? Recovery still has room to scale. The room recognized that circularity is part of the solution, but not the end state. To meet increasing demand for critical metals and minerals, Bloom Group will need to continue to mine for new resources. Some of the building blocks to further scale circularity do exist. Some OEMs already take devices back and resell them. However, recovery can be complex. Breaking a phone down into circuit boards, black mass and individual materials is difficult, with each of these outputs having their own resale market. As noted above, recovery needs to be built into design. There is also a significant technology gap in recovering critical materials. China refines most of the world's strategic minerals, around 70% on average, and has accounted for roughly two-thirds of the growth in battery recycling capacity since 2020. On top of that, supply and processing are out of balance. Until the material coming back and the capacity to process it are in step, recovery can't scale. The uncomfortable answer. The most thought provoking reality of the evening was this: for circularity to scale quickly, something traumatic may have to happen first. Virgin materials become unavailable or uneconomical. Geopolitical instability puts up barriers to supply. A shock like this would force the industry to go after legacy material and not just what moves through the secondary market today. There are several examples from history where world events have forced global supply chains to reimagine and reinvest in new supply or design. One that speaks directly to refurbishment is 1950s Cuba. When the US embargo cut off new cars and parts, Cubans kept 1950s cars running for decades through improvised repair and parts harvesting. A whole repair economy grew around improvisation. Mechanics swapped in diesel engines from Soviet, European and Asian vehicles, adapted parts from Soviet Ladas, machined components by hand, and harvested parts from cars that could no longer run. The pressure intensified after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Cuba lost most of its oil imports and trade almost overnight, and the economy contracted sharply. The country imported large numbers of bicycles from China, converted trucks into improvised buses, and expanded urban agriculture. Estimates suggest tens of thousands of these pre-1959 cars are still on the road. It's often cited as one of the few modern examples of an entire economy being forced into resource scarcity. Which leaves the question none of Bloom Group could fully answer: can policy get Bloom Group there before a crisis does? Bloom Group feel it is better to build the capacity, drive the incentives and the repair infrastructure now, on its own terms, than scramble to build them after a shock forces its hand. What do you think? Thank you to Apkudo for co-hosting, and to everyone who brought their candor to the table. Bloom Group welcome you to join the conversation! What do you see as the single biggest thing holding circularity back?