How Back Market Uses Culture to Compete

Spotlight

Chief People Officer Axelle Caharel is protecting a culture built around challenging the status quo, giving Back Market another way to compete in a market dominated by new technology.

Back Market has always positioned itself against something much bigger than another marketplace. The company wants refurbished technology to compete with the instinct to buy new. Internally, that has created a useful cultural question: if the business exists to challenge an established industry, what kind of organisation does it need behind it?

For Chief People Officer Axelle Caharel, the answer is not to create a workplace that simply feels energetic or unconventional. It is to preserve the behaviours that allow Back Market to behave differently as the company gets larger.

“Preserving a company’s identity when everything accelerates” is the question Caharel says occupies her most as a people leader. Her view is that culture cannot simply be declared by leadership. It has to be protected through the decisions a company makes every day.

That makes culture part of Back Market’s competitive model. The company operates in a category where the default behaviour is deeply established. People have spent decades being encouraged to replace devices with the newest version. Back Market has to persuade customers to think differently, which makes a willingness to question familiar assumptions useful well beyond the marketing department.

Internally, the company calls that instinct Sabotage. The idea originated when Back Market was still a team of around 20 to 25 people. Co-founder Vianney Vaute has described an early attempt to define the company’s values that resulted in the kind of broad language that could have belonged to almost any organisation. The team went back to the exercise and eventually settled on one idea that felt more specific to them: sabotage.

It gave employees something more practical than a conventional values statement. Back Market had an established system it wanted to disrupt, and limited resources with which to do it. The culture therefore needed people prepared to find unconventional routes around problems rather than accepting the obvious answer.

Years later, that idea still sits underneath the company’s wider set of mantras. Back Market describes Sabotage as its “cultural operating system”, supported by behaviours that encourage people to take considered risks and speak directly when they disagree.

The important part is that Caharel’s team has tried to make those ideas consequential.

Back Market says values carry the same weight as technical ability during hiring. Candidates can reach the final stages of a process with the skills required for the role and still not be hired if the company believes the cultural alignment is wrong. A dedicated final interview focuses specifically on that dimension.

The same expectations continue once somebody is inside. Back Market has connected its internal mantras to performance discussions rather than leaving them behind in onboarding. Employees are assessed not only on what they deliver, but on how they work while delivering it. Caharel’s argument is that if a company claims particular behaviours matter, those behaviours have to influence the systems people actually experience.

That is where culture begins to affect competitiveness. A company can tell employees to challenge an industry, but people are unlikely to take many meaningful risks if the internal system rewards playing safe. Equally, encouraging disagreement means little if employees learn that challenging someone more senior creates problems for them later.

Back Market’s “Say it straight, hear no hate” mantra is an attempt to make disagreement usable. People are encouraged to say what they actually think while keeping the conversation constructive. Caharel has also spoken publicly about vulnerability as a leadership behaviour, arguing that people become more willing to speak honestly when leaders show that they do not have every answer themselves.

That matters in a company spread across seven global offices and a workforce of hundreds of people. The informal signals that once travelled naturally through a small founding team have to become much more deliberate when colleagues are working across Paris, New York, London, Barcelona, Bordeaux, Berlin and Tokyo.

Employees have quarterly check-ins designed to create regular conversations around development. DEI onboarding establishes expectations around how people work together from the beginning, while employee resource groups give colleagues additional spaces to connect across the organisation.

Back Market also brings its wider team together through an annual company retreat. The point is not simply to create another social event. For a company operating across multiple markets, those moments give people who normally experience Back Market through very different teams a shared understanding of the organisation they belong to.

Its technology organisation has built similar mechanisms around craft.

Engineers run internal conferences, chapter meetings and knowledge-sharing sessions, with senior technical employees encouraged to influence decisions rather than simply execute them. Back Market describes that culture as intentional: engineers closest to the work should have enough voice to improve the systems around them.

Back Market is competing against companies with considerably greater resources. It cannot assume that adding more people or more process is the answer every time a problem becomes difficult. People closer to the work need enough confidence and authority to spot an opportunity and act on it.

The company has worked on making career paths more transparent, while employees have moved between functions in ways that would be difficult inside organisations with more rigid ideas about professional identity. Caharel’s tenure in the People function has included building those systems alongside clearer approaches to performance and progression.

Back Market’s early-career employees describe being given meaningful work quickly and being encouraged to bring forward ideas even when they are junior. That matters because a culture built around challenging convention becomes difficult to sustain if permission to challenge is reserved for people who have already accumulated status.

Back Market went through a restructuring in 2023, and Caharel has since spoken about revisiting the company’s values with employees rather than assuming the language created during an earlier stage of the business would automatically remain useful. The mantras were treated as something that could be examined and rebuilt rather than preserved because they had become part of company history.

That may be one of the more important parts of Back Market’s approach.

Culture is often discussed as something companies are trying not to lose. Caharel’s view is closer to protecting the underlying identity while allowing the systems around it to change.

Back Market can no longer operate like the small group that originally chose the word Sabotage. It has more employees and more specialised teams, and people join without having experienced the stories that shaped the company in its first few years.

Caharel has said values have to remain present from recruitment through strategic decisions. That provides a fairly practical test of whether the culture is still doing useful work. If the mantras affect who gets hired, how people are evaluated and which behaviours leaders tolerate, they remain part of the organisation. If they only survive as language, they do not.

The company wants customers to question one of consumer technology’s most deeply embedded habits: that the newest device is automatically the better choice.

The people behind that mission are being asked to practise a similar instinct internally. Question the obvious answer. Say when something does not make sense. Find a route through the problem with the resources available.

That is where Back Market’s culture becomes competitive. It gives the company a way to keep challenging a much larger industry without requiring every good idea to originate from the top. And for Caharel, preserving that behaviour as Back Market grows may be as important as preserving any individual ritual or perk.

The company’s culture does not need to look exactly as it did when there were 25 people in the room. It needs people to keep behaving like changing the established answer is still part of their job.