How recommerce is reshaping ecommerce

Monica Trabjerg Balle was Head of eCommerce at Roccamore — a Copenhagen brand making handmade shoes — when recommerce came onto her radar not as a sustainability exercise, but as a commercial decision. As Chief Commercial Officer at Create2Stay, she now builds those circular models for brands across Denmark and Europe. This episode is an unusually practical account of what recommerce looks like at the operational level: who does what, how the data flows, and what the numbers actually show.

The Roccamore case is the clearest illustration. A customer wanting to trade in a pair of shoes logs into the website, finds their order, sees the reward they will receive — a discount voucher or loyalty points — and gets a prepaid QR code. The shoe arrives at the Create2Stay warehouse. The team grades it, cleans it, photographs it, gives it a new SKU derived from the original product metadata, and lists it in the Roccamore store at a pre-set percentage of the new price. The buyer gets the shoe shipped in Roccamore-branded packaging with postcards and stickers. They never know Create2Stay was involved.

The numbers that came back from that programme changed the frame. Forty-two percent of all secondhand purchases at Roccamore were made by customers who had never bought from the brand before. Return rates on secondhand items ran at roughly half the rate of new products. When someone buys secondhand, Monica's read is simple: they really wanted that specific item. The buyer is already a brand ambassador before the first order lands.

Recommerce is also opening channels that brands previously could not access. Wholesale-only brands — those selling through Boozt or Zalando with no direct-to-consumer relationship — are using take-back programmes to pull customers into their own platform for the first time, capturing email addresses and consent they would never otherwise collect. And in physical stores, the same logic applies. Monica's argument throughout is the same: this is not a CSR initiative. It is a revenue channel that also happens to be the right thing to do.