Back Market Founder & CEO Stakes his Mother's Life on its Phone Quality Guarantee

Back Market, a leading global marketplace for refurbished tech, unveiled a new global campaign in which Founder & CEO Thibaud Hug de Larauze puts the highest collateral imaginable behind the company's quality promise: his own mother, Valerie.

In the film, Hug de Larauze commits to Back Market's promise that every refurbished phone sold on the platform meets the highest standard for customers - "swearing on my mom's life" that the company will deliver on it, with his on-screen mother, Valerie, backing the promise at his side.

The campaign is designed to address the single biggest barrier to refurbished tech adoption: trust. Despite growing awareness of e-waste and overconsumption, many consumers still default to buying new because they assume refurbished means compromised.

"We wanted a way to make our quality promise impossible to doubt. So we picked the highest stakes a person can offer. If people remember one thing about Back Market after this, it should be that we don't make this promise lightly."

— Thibaud Hug de Larauze, Founder & CEO of Back Market

Every device sold on Back Market undergoes a rigorous multi-point grading and quality-control process before it ever reaches a customer, including up to a 100-point quality inspection, a 30-day free returns policy, and a 12-month warranty as standard. The results speak for themselves: across 38 million devices sold and at exponential scale, Back Market has driven its defect-free delivery rate from 85% in 2018 to over 96% today.

"Trust has always been the most important thing we had to earn. This campaign is us putting everything on the table. The quality of refurbished tech on our platform today is genuinely competitive with new, and we believe it's time consumers felt that confidence too. When Thibaud stakes his mother's life on it, we're not just doing a stunt. We're telling the truth loudly."

— Joy Howard, CMO, Back Market

The film centres on the relationship between Hug de Larauze and his mother, playing the extravagance of the gesture against the quiet steadiness of the woman beside him. Her presence, her reactions and the looks between them do as much work as the words, turning a bold claim into comedy with real warmth underneath.

"The truth about Back Market's quality is genuinely remarkable, so the challenge was making people believe it. The most powerful thing anyone can do to prove they mean something is stake what they love most on it. Harold understood immediately that the bigger and funnier we went, the more the sincerity underneath would land. That tension between the ridiculous gesture and the real promise is the whole idea."

— Tomas Coleman, Executive Creative Director at Mother

This month the campaign launches in New York across TV, video-on-demand, out-of-home, social and audio, and will activate in August across Europe; in the UK, US, France, Germany and Spain. Building on Back Market's ongoing "Let's End Fast Tech" platform, challenging the technology industry's culture of constant upgrades.

About Back Market

Back Market is a leading global marketplace dedicated to professionally refurbished technology. Back Market's mission is to create a world that does more with what we already have by prolonging the lifespan of electronic devices through circularity and repair. Founded in Paris in 2014, the company has grown by double digits year over year and to date has 18 million customers across 17 markets, avoiding more than 2 billion Kg of carbon emissions.*

*Back Market calculation based on Ademe 2022 study

About Mother

Mother is one of the world's most respected, independent creative agencies. Starting life around one table with three people, all of whom shared the washing up. Nearly 30 years later, Mother has offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai and Berlin, working with iconic brands that include Anthropic, KFC, Lufthansa Group, Marks & Spencer, Meta, The Wall Street Journal and Uber.

Press Contact: press@backmarket.com