9 Years of refurbed: An Unfiltered Conversation With Our Founders

Nine years ago, two friends sat down with a shared conviction: circular economy shouldn’t be the exception - it should be the norm. When they looked at the tech industry, they couldn’t ignore the imbalance: innovation was accelerating at full speed, yet devices were being replaced long before their true potential was used - a cycle that simply didn’t make sense. And the waste that followed? Honestly, absurd.

To celebrate refurbed’s ninth birthday, founders Peter and Kilian recorded a special podcast episode where they tell the story in their own words: from the decisive dinner that sparked the idea to personally calling the first 200 customers. This podcast is a candid reflection on what worked, what didn’t, and why the mission of “making sustainable consumption the new normal” still matters today. 💚

The Dinner That Changed Our Lives

“This system is so inefficient. It has to work better.” - Peter Windischhofer

That’s how Peter describes the moment the circular economy stopped being a theory and became a mission. The idea was simple, but powerful: we extract valuable resources from across the globe, build high-tech devices, ship them worldwide - only for many of them to end up unused in drawers or discarded far too soon. For the founders, this wasn’t just a “fancy” market opportunity. It was a broken system that needed fixing.

That conviction became the foundation of refurbed — built to prove that there is a smarter way: extend the life of technology, preserve valuable resources, reduce waste, and make sustainability the easy choice, not the compromise.

Earning Trust, One Customer at a Time

“My biggest learning was that people didn’t really believe refurbished could be better. So we had to build proof.” - Kilian Kaminski

After the initial realisation that the system was broken, this was the next big wake-up call. For Kilian, it wasn’t enough to know that refurbished made sense - customers had to feel it. And in the early days, trust was the real barrier. Refurbished sat awkwardly between “new” and “used,” and for many people, that simply sounded too good to be true.

So instead of just talking about sustainability, the founders focused on proof. A 30-day free trial. A minimum 12-month warranty. Real humans answering the hotline. Personally calling the first 200 customers to understand their doubts. Step by step, they replaced skepticism with experience. Because once people held a refurbished phone in their hands and realised it looked and worked like new, belief followed naturally. That shift - from promise to proof - became one of the defining building blocks of refurbed’s growth.

The scale changed, the mission didn’t

Years after that dinner, after the first skeptical customers, the first funding round, the first 19 products sold in a weekend, refurbed is no longer just an idea trying to prove itself. It’s a movement powered by millions of purchase decisions - each one a small but meaningful step toward a more circular economy.

But for Peter and Kilian, this anniversary isn’t a finish line. **It’s a reminder of why they started in the first place: to make sustainable consumption the new normal. What began as an idea is now one of Europe’s leading marketplaces for refurbished tech - operating across multiple markets and serving millions of customers.

The scale has changed. The mission hasn’t. And if the first nine years were about proving, again and again, that recommerce can be better, the next chapter is about accelerating the shift toward a truly circular economy - and making the smarter choice the obvious one.

Watch the full podcast episode on our Youtube channel.