Refurbished is no longer pitched primarily as the green choice; it’s pitched as the smart choice that also happens to be green.
Anca Schmidt Popescu, Director Trade-In Programs, Flip.ro
This is the second time you’ve joined us as a judge. How did you find the experience the first time round?
Honestly, I did not know what to expect when I first agreed to participate as a judge. I felt energized (after spending more than 15 years in the industry), that such an event finally takes place and the industry gathers to celebrate the companies that are really bringing value and expertise for the entire spectrum of services and products in the circular tech.
What I appreciated most was the range — you go from reading about a small repair workshop scaling regionally, to a corporate take-back program processing hundreds of thousands of devices, all at the same time. It forces you to sharpen your own thinking about what ‘circular’ actually means in practice, because the same word covers very different business models.
What I also noticed is that there is a real openness in this community — people share what’s working and what isn’t, even when they are technically competitors. I left with a longer list of ideas than I came in with, which is the best outcome I can ask for from any industry event.
So when the invitation came around again this year, it was an easy yes.
What do you look for when reviewing and application?
Three things, in roughly this order.
First, evidence over intent. A lot of applications describe ambition beautifully, but I’m looking for what has been realised — devices collected, customers served, emissions avoided, partnerships signed. Numbers don’t have to be huge to be impressive; they must be real and verifiable.
Second, the depth of the circular thinking. It’s easy to bolt a recycling label onto a fundamentally linear business. The applications that stand out treat circularity as part of the unit economics — where the second life of a product is designed into the first sale, not added as an afterthought when the device comes back.
And third, replicability. Can this be scaled, or copied by others, or extended into adjacent categories? The awards exist to push the whole industry forward, so I give weight to projects that move the bar for everyone, not just for the company submitting.
What changes have you seen in the circular tech industry over the last 8 months?
A few shifts feel quite tangible. The first is that the conversation has moved from sustainability as the headline to affordability as the headline, with sustainability becoming the underlying enabler. Refurbished is no longer pitched primarily as the green choice; it’s pitched as the smart choice that also happens to be green. That reframing has broadened the addressable audience considerably.
Second, the OEM and premium-retail side of the market has clearly woken up and the field of circular tech is becoming mainstream. Today we’re seeing premium resellers, carriers and manufacturers actively integrating buyback into the new-device purchase journey. That changes the supply dynamics — more devices entering the circular loop at the moment of upgrade, in better condition, with cleaner provenance.
Third, the regulatory backdrop is starting to bite in a productive way. The EU’s eco-design and right-to-repair rules that came in last summer, and the gradual rollout of digital product passports, are creating real infrastructure for traceability and quality grading. That’s good for trust, which is the thing the secondary market has historically been short of.
And finally, on the operational side, AI-assisted grading and diagnostics have moved from pilot to production at most serious refurbishing companies. It sounds technical, but it matters — consistent grading is what allows trade-in pricing to be both fair to the customer and predictable for the business.
Flip recently levelled up its trade-in partnership with Apple Premium Reseller, iStyle. How is the trade-in market developing in Romania?
The iStyle partnership is a good lens for the bigger picture. We started working with them in late 2024, launched in their physical stores in May 2025, and this month extended the program online through their platform — so customers can now value their old device either in-store with an on-the-spot evaluation, or fully digitally before checkout. For Flip, it’s our first integration with an Apple Premium Partner, which is a meaningful milestone because it brings buyback into the new-device purchase moment in a premium retail environment.
On the broader Romanian market, three things are striking. Awareness has crossed a threshold — trade-in is no longer something you have to explain. Customers walking into an iStyle store increasingly arrive already expecting to be offered a trade-in value, the way they would in the US or UK. Five years ago that was not the case here.
Second, the convert rate from “curious” to “actually traded in” is climbing as we remove friction. Hybrid models — physical evaluation for people who want certainty and human contact, online evaluation for people who want speed — turn out to matter much more than choosing one channel over the other. Romanian consumers are not homogeneous in how they want to do this, and forcing them into a single flow leaves a lot of devices on the table.
Third, and this is the part I find most encouraging, trade-in is starting to shift purchasing behaviour, not just dispose of old hardware. That’s the circular economy doing what it’s supposed to do — keeping devices moving through the system rather than sitting in drawers, and making the new purchase more affordable in the process. We have a way to go before we match the maturity of Western European markets, but the trajectory over the last months has been faster than I would have predicted a year ago.