This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.
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Today we’ll distill the company behind the AI-powered browser extension and app making second-hand shopping effortless and sustainable at scale: Faircado 🇩🇪
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What Problem Does Faircado Tackle❓
They address the massive disconnect between the desire to shop sustainably and the actual behavior of consumers.
1. Convenience Gap: 53% of consumers say they would buy more second-hand items if it were easier. Currently, the convenience of “1-click” purchasing for new items on giants like Amazon dramatically creates a barrier to entry for the circular economy.
2. Invisible Alternatives: Most online shoppers don’t know a cheaper, second-hand version of the item they are viewing exists just a click away. Since sustainable alternatives aren’t visible directly at the point of sale, consumers default to the linear “buy new-use-throw” model.
3. Market Fragmentation: The resale market is spread across many different platforms (eBay, Vinted, Back Market, etc.). Finding a specific item requires opening dozens of tabs and spending hours searching.
4. Linear Model Impact: Always buying new is an expensive habit. Consumers miss out on average savings of 50% found in the resale market and we unnecessarily generate millions of tonnes of waste and CO2 emissions.
Product / Service 📦
They created a free AI-powered browser extension and mobile app that integrates seamlessly into the traditional e-commerce flow to automatically find second-hand and refurbished alternatives for products.
Convenience: The extension pops up automatically while you shop on 1600+ sites like Amazon, Zalando or Apple. No need to visit multiple platforms separately.
Aggregation: Their software aggregates over 100 million products from 70+ trusted second-hand partners (eBay, Vinted, Back Market, etc.) into a single comparison view.
AI Matching: Advanced image-matching algorithms and NLP (natural language processing) precisely compare the new product with its pre-loved equivalent, solving the difficulty of searching for items that lack standard product codes.
Trust & Transparency: Both the pop-up and app provide essential, instant information like the item’s condition, detailed filtering options, and crucial details like the return policy of the second-hand seller.
Extra Features: You can search directly, save favorites, set price alerts, and receive personalized recommendations based on your preferences.
Market 🌐
The global second-hand goods market was valued at around $520 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach over $1.5 trillion by 2032.
That crazy growth is driven both by younger consumers choosing more sustainable behaviors and the need to save money to afford increasing living costs and overall inflation.
Patagonia & Amazon integration examples
Other Key Players
Beni 🇺🇸: Browser extension that also offers second-hand alternatives while shopping, though it primarily focuses on apparel.
Encore 🇺🇸: This platform focuses more on AI-powered search to handle highly specific, natural language queries like finding a celebrity outfit.
Faircado stands out thanks to its AI image-matching tech and the huge range of products it covers.
Founding Story 🦄
Evoléna and Ali
Faircado was founded in 2021 by Evoléna de Wilde d’Estmael and Ali Nezamolmaleki in Berlin. The idea came when Evoléna moved to an unfurnished flat and spent hours frustrated searching for second-hand furniture across dozens of marketplaces.
She also grew up in an ecologically conscious environment and was passionate about sustainability, so that helps.
Realizing there was a need to consolidate all available second-hand goods in one place, she joined forces with Ali, a software engineer with a decade of experience and a friend from her previous work.
In 2021 they launched the extension and spent the next few years building the app, improving the image recognition, and scaling the number of partners and compatible websites as fast as possible.
It’s free for users, they monetize by charging for the traffic they send to the different marketplaces.
They’ve raised over €3.5 million since launch, won the prestigious 2023 Slush 100 competition (€1 million prize), and they’re already present in 12 markets.
Top Impact Stats 📈
Together with Everwave, Faircado collects 1 kg of waste from the world’s waters for each download of the browser extension.
Buying a second-hand item typically saves up to 90% of the CO2 emissions associated with producing a brand new one.
Faircado achieves average discounts of about 60% on used products versus new ones, with up to 90% in some cases.
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