In this episode of Marketing Un:Learned, Ian Jindal talks with Luke Forshaw about unlearning the “new is best” dogma in consumer electronics and building a mainstream appetite for refurbished tech. From reframing second-hand as “renewed” to tackling e-waste, planned obsolescence and trust frictions, Luke shares how Back Market is turning circularity into an everyday choice rather than a niche crusade.
Drawing on his years working on Apple at Media Arts Lab and in entertainment and finance brands, he explains how social, creators and physical retail experiments are helping to normalise refurbished devices across categories—from iPhones and laptops to coffee machines, pizza ovens and retro consoles.
About the Guest
Luke Forshaw is Head of Marketing for Back Market in the UK, responsible for brand, performance and customer growth in one of the company’s newer but fast-developing markets. Back Market is a French-founded marketplace that sells refurbished tech, aiming to make “renewed” devices safer, easier and more affordable to buy while extending product lifecycles and cutting e-waste.
Before joining Back Market three years ago, Luke spent around seven years at Apple’s dedicated agency Media Arts Lab and has held marketing and media roles at Universal, Aviva, Beats, Red Bull and Vice. He originally studied English with ambitions to be a writer, discovering marketing through student work with Red Bull and Vice and staying with the discipline after graduating in 2010.
Episode Outline & Key Topics
The mission: making renewed tech normal, not niche
Back Market’s model and ambitions
Back Market positions itself as the world’s largest marketplace for refurbished devices, focused on prolonging the life of tech products and reducing climate impact from electronics waste. Luke unpacks three core pillars: sustainability (building a robust circular economy), quality (raising standards for reliability and experience in refurbished electronics) and accessibility (closing the digital divide by making high-end devices more affordable).
Beyond smartphones: from iPhones to air fryers and pizza ovens
While a majority of Back Market’s global purchases sit in smartphones (with iPhones leading in the UK), Luke explains why the business is pushing into laptops, tablets, kitchen appliances and “obscure” models like Ooni pizza ovens and Sage coffee machines. Wherever they add a new category, they see demand from consumers who want both sharper prices and more sustainable options, so the team is actively opening new lines and building demand around them.
Unlearning “new is best” in consumer tech
Challenging the upgrade treadmill and “vintage tech”
Ian and Luke explore how decades of marketing have equated progress and status with owning the latest device, and why that logic is breaking down. Luke argues that innovation deltas in smartphones and laptops are now often marginal for everyday use, price points are increasingly prohibitive, and many consumers are simply asking: “If what I’ve got works, why upgrade?”
They also discuss the rise of “retro tech” on Back Market—from older iPhones and iPods to Sega Mega Drives—which has become one of the fastest-growing and most frequently sold-out subcategories, fuelled by nostalgia and a desire to switch off from always-on connectivity.
Planned obsolescence, forced upgrades and “the obsolete computer”
Luke describes Back Market’s more activist stance on parts of the tech industry it sees as unethical—from extraction and production through to marketing and planned obsolescence. He shares a campaign built around Windows 10’s end-of-support, where the team took an “obsolete” computer, deliberately broke it and then revived it with an alternative OS package to show students and everyday users they didn’t need to buy a new laptop just because software support had ended.
The broader goal is to keep devices in circulation longer—through cleaning, optimisation and workarounds to forced obsolescence—whether or not the user ultimately buys from Back Market.
Trust frictions: from “pub seller” worries to quality guarantees
Defining “refurbished” versus “used” and “second-hand”
Luke talks through research Back Market has done across its markets to understand both motivations for buying refurbished tech and the perceived barriers. In the UK, most people say they know what “refurbished” means, but when probed they often lump together buying from a friend in the pub, a stranger on Facebook Marketplace and purchasing via a professional marketplace.
Luke outlines how Back Market works with professional refurbishers who test and repair devices to “good as new” thresholds and backs that with warranties, free shipping and returns, and 30-day return windows—protections you do not get from casual peer-to-peer sellers.
Educating without boring: creators, partners and timing
Because quality messaging can be dry, Back Market leans on trusted voices—creators, partners and seller relationships—to “lift the curtain” on what refurbishment actually involves. Luke stresses that this is a long-term, segmented education job: if they tried to tell everyone everything at once, consumers would either drown in information or switch off, so the team focuses on who most needs reassurance and at which moment in their journey to address fears about devices being stolen, broken or uncovered.
Marketing unlearned: social, creators and circular behaviours
How social and creator strategy has changed
From a marketer’s perspective, Luke says the biggest change in his time at Back Market has been how social platforms and their algorithms have reshaped brand activity. The team used to run relatively disconnected upper-funnel education, quality reassurance and price-based assets across paid social; now they aim for a cleaner, more uniform thread in creative and talent, which is especially important when you are trying to signal quality and trust.
Instead of “cocaine marketing” with one-off mega-influencers, Back Market is building ambassador relationships where the same creators show up repeatedly, mixing organic and paid content so their audiences see consistency as well as reach. Creators are given more control over format, captions and hooks, because they understand how platform algorithms and keywords are shifting, and Back Market positions itself as the enabler rather than the script-writer.
Retention without fuelling overconsumption
Because Back Market’s mission is to fight e-waste and overconsumption, standard “it’s time to upgrade” CRM plays would contradict the brand. Luke explains that while they will follow up purchases with sensible prompts—trade-in offers, accessories, or adjacent category ideas for people clearly in a given ecosystem—they are equally likely to send service-oriented content, such as videos on properly cleaning a phone or laptop recorded with an ex-Apple Genius in Back Market’s lab.
The aim is to keep the brand top of mind and positive while encouraging longer device lifespans, rather than pushing annual replacement cycles.
Customers, data and cross-category insight
Even in a relatively young market like the UK, Back Market is learning from device and category combinations—such as buyers of premium coffee machines and vacuum cleaners—about tastes and likely appetite for “nice-to-have” items like pizza ovens. At the same time, Luke notes that many buyers may come once for a replacement smartphone after a loss or breakage and never return, so behaviour is far from the neat, vendor-driven upgrade cycles familiar to OEMs.
This mix of high-frequency ecosystem users and one-off problem solvers shapes how Back Market thinks about segments, cross-sell and the balance between revenue and mission.
Physical retail and the craft of refurbishment
Inside Back Market’s New York pop-up store
Luke walks through Back Market’s Broadway pop-up in New York, created in part because a majority of US consumers still buy tech in bricks-and-mortar stores compared with more online-heavy behaviour in the UK. As well as selling devices, the space offers device cleaning, on-site diagnostic machines, and a retro gaming area with classic titles, alongside events from telco panels to kids’ sessions.
The store is designed less as a hard-sell environment and more as a place to spend time around refurbished tech, see how grading and testing work in real time, and experience the brand physically.
Right to repair, iFixit and putting the workbench up front
The front of the store foregrounds cleaning and repairability rather than product displays, echoing a broader ambition to make fixing devices feel tangible rather than mystical. Luke talks about Back Market’s support for right-to-repair efforts in the UK and its collaboration with iFixit, whose mission is to provide manuals and repair sheets for electronics worldwide so consumers can keep devices going rather than binning them at the first fault.
The long-term vision is to make toolkits and know-how widely accessible, so that more people can repair their own phones, laptops and appliances and see refurbishment as a normal, empowered act, not a back-alley compromise.
Teenagers, ethics and the next generation of device owners
How 15-year-olds might see ownership and fairness
Luke is cautious about language around teenagers and tech, given concerns about social media harms and policy moves like proposed social media bans, but sees independence as central: teens rely on devices for education, social life and leisure, from laptops and tablets to phones and consoles.
Today’s teenagers have grown up with tech from early childhood and are more attuned to sustainability, fairness and ethics; in his view, that makes them less accepting of forced upgrades, high prices and opaque obsolescence than previous generations. Refurbished and renewed tech can give them more freedom to choose what they actually need at a price they can afford, without feeling obliged to conform to a single “latest model or loser” narrative, and that aligns closely with Back Market’s mission.
Resources & Links
Back Market – https://www.backmarket.com
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About Marketing Un:Learned
Marketing Un:Learned explores the challenges that leading-edge digital marketing poses to established and received wisdom. All new initiatives face scrutiny—the “what-abouts,” statements of inertia, and deprioritising questions. In this series, we take those challenges head-on and learn how exemplars deliver persuasively, perhaps changing our thinking along the way. In partnership with Epsilon, we focus on innovation in retail media, digital advertising, CRM and personalisation, speaking with expert practitioners who have moved beyond optimised, well-known processes.
