Marc Downer, Co-Founder of Sofalistic and Repurch, explains more about the launch of Repurch and why it’s a game changer for retailers.
At the start of last month, a new UK platform announced its launch into the industry in an effort to aid furniture retailers by bridging the sustainability gap with resale opportunities. That platform is Repurch.
“Repurch is trade-in and clearance infrastructure for furniture brands,” Marc said. “A customer trades in their old sofa via the retailer’s own branded portal. Repurch handles everything operational from there – free collection from the home, anti-scam validation, sale, escrow, two-man nationwide delivery to the new owner. The retailer never funds a credit that doesn’t materialise.”
The platform runs on the back of the Sofalistic Marketplace – a UK consumer resale platform that has been live since 2024. So, roll on two years, why was now the right time to make the Repurch introduction? Marc explains: “Three things have lined up at once. The cost-of-living squeeze has made secondhand mainstream – Vinted is now the UK’s third-largest fashion retailer, Back Market made Time’s 100 most influential companies this year.
“Resale is normal in fashion, phones and electronics. Yet furniture – the highest-value category in anyone’s home – is still the last major category without a proper trade-in route. And on the policy side, the government’s Circular Economy Growth Plan is coming, which will push retailers to take responsibility for the full life of what they sell.
“We spent a year in R&D and 18 months proving the consumer demand through our marketplace, Sofalistic. Repurch is the moment we turn that into something retailers can plug into. The demand is already here; what’s been missing is the infrastructure.”
Marc added that Repurch has been built and funded from within the business – not on borrowed money or burned investment. The marketplace, Sofalistic, already generates revenue, with the business reinvesting that revenue into building the platform. “That’s the part we’re proudest of: Repurch is built and live now, funded by a business that already works, rather than something waiting on a cheque to exist.
“We’re now raising a seed round – not to get off the ground, but to grow faster: onboard retailers at pace and expand into new markets from a platform that’s already proven. We’re in active conversations with several UK enterprise furniture retailers, and the interest is at exactly the tier we hoped for.”
So, how does it work?
Repurch gives a furniture retailer a branded trade-in channel – the Exchange – that lives on their own website. Their customer starts a trade-in or lists a preloved piece there, under the retailer’s brand, and that listing flows straight onto Sofalistic, its consumer marketplace, where the sale actually happens. Clearance works the same way: a retailer’s own overstock, ex-display and returns are listed through Repurch and sold on Sofalistic.
“The retailer never has to run a marketplace or a resale checkout themselves – they get a branded on-ramp into demand that already exists: 100,000+ registered buyers, 18 months live,” Marc said. “Behind the scenes we handle the hard parts – free collection, nationwide two-man delivery and anti-scam validation.
“But the real value isn’t the resale margin – it’s what the trade-in does next. Every trade-in brings a customer back onto the retailer’s own site and turns an old sofa into credit toward a new one, so resale becomes a reason to buy again rather than a one-off transaction. The retailer keeps the customer, the brand and most of the margin – and gets an acquisition and retention channel that pays for itself.”
Marc added that since launch, the feedback and early adoption has been encouraging with consistent reactions across the board. “The first is “why wouldn’t we do this?” – once a retailer sees the demand sitting in their own returns and trade-ins, and that we handle the platform and the logistics, the economics answer themselves.
“The second, which means even more to me, is “finally, someone listened” – furniture retailers have known for years that resale and trade-in should be part of their business; the barrier was always having to build it themselves, and we’ve removed that. And when they actually see the platform, the response has been blunt: one called it “next level”. We’ve put a lot into making it genuinely good, not just functional, so that lands well.”
Through Repurch, the team aims to make resale a standard part of how furniture is sold and not a side project or a sustainability gesture, but a real revenue line for the retailers who make and sell the products. “Right now, when someone resells a £1,500 sofa for £175, the brand that made it sees none of that second sale,” Marc continued. “We want to change that: give every furniture retailer a branded trade-in channel that feeds an established marketplace, so they capture the value of the second life instead of losing it to peer-to-peer platforms.
“Repurch is built for Europe, and the UK is our proving ground, not our ceiling. We’re also looking to expand categories, implementing the same model that works for sofas works for the wider home, and we’re building toward any retailer being able to offer resale and trade-in across furniture and homeware under their own brand. We’re also continuing to invest in the consumer side through Sofalistic, because a healthy marketplace is what makes the retailer proposition work.”
How do retailers get involved with Repurch?
“It’s deliberately low-friction, because they’re not building or running a marketplace – they’re plugging into ours,” Marc added. “It starts with a conversation about their numbers – GMV, returns and clearance volumes – and we model what trade-in and resale could be worth to them. From there we set up the branded Exchange channel on their own site, which feeds listings into Sofalistic, along with Clearance for their overstock and the logistics layer underneath. They can be live without standing up a new platform or a new operations team.
“The bigger picture is simple: reuse shouldn’t depend on people being resourceful enough to hunt for a bargain – it should be the default the whole industry is built around. Furniture carries huge environmental weight: it’s bulky, hard to recycle and far too much of it ends up in landfill while it still has years of life left.
“If we can make it as easy for a retailer to resell a sofa as it is to sell a new one, that’s a genuinely better model – for their margins, for their customers and for the amount of good furniture we keep out of the ground.”
