The refurbished or used smartphone market in India is booming, with a report by Redseer Strategy Consultants estimating it to soar to $10 billion by 2026.
Avneet Singh and Saket Saurav spotted this opportunity working at Shopclues, which had then introduced a refurbished mobile category, ReNew, which generated multi-crore revenues in the first month.
The two friends and colleagues quit their jobs in May 2017 and launched ReFit Global — a refurbished phone startup, on a mission to reduce e-waste by recycling and refurbishing second-hand gadgets.
They invested all their savings and the then 28-year-olds took a personal loan of Rs 15 lakh each and bootstrapped their business with a total capital of Rs 55 lakh.
What sets ReFit apart, according to the founders, is the quality and credibility which is lacking in a second-hand phone.
“There is no quality testing or checking done on a second-hand phone. We ensure that there is no problem with the phone and give you a warranty,” says Saket, co-founder and CEO, ReFit Global.
ReFit sources old phones from three channels — marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart, mobile manufacturers like Samsung, Oppo, Vivo, and Apple, and large format retailers like Sangeetha, Poorvika, and Croma.
The phones are first tested using ReFit’s in-house diagnostic application which has 47 quality check parameters which takes about 2.5 minutes.
Once the faults are identified, the engineers rectify and repair the phones, conducting further checks to see if the sensors and cameras are working properly.
After this, the application is run again to check if it passes all quality checks. It is then sent either to offline partners or sold through their own website.
They offer a six-month warranty on their phones and the average selling price offline is Rs 6,000 and online is Rs 11,000.
ReFit is on track to achieve a revenue of Rs 240 crore and prevent 55,000 to 65,000 phones from becoming e-waste every month.
The seven-year journey has been a rollercoaster ride for the founders who would initially load about 100 refurbished phones in their cars, set out to the market, and convince channel partners to buy these phones.
The first two years were particularly difficult, with Saket’s wife being pregnant and Avneet looking to get married.
“We invested all our savings; it was ‘do or die’ for us. We had a strong belief that it would work, and worked hard. We took no days off and burnt the midnight oil. We focused on building a good offline base and educating our distributors while building partnerships with mobile brands and marketplaces to buy back old phones,” adds Saket.
ReFit also appeared on Shark Tank India Season 3 and secured a deal for Rs 2 crore from Anupam Mittal, Vineeta Singh, and Amit Jain.