 All right. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. I know a lot of us haven't seen sunshine for a very long time, nor have we smelt some fresh air. So hopefully this will get you guys in the spirit and re-energized and all of that glorious stuff. But before we start, I think we should introduce ourselves. So everybody knows who we are and why we're here to speak today. I'll kick off. I'm Joy. I'm a partner at a firm called Generation, been a partner for around a decade now. And if you don't know Generation, we were founded around 20 years ago with a single mission in mind. And that was to demonstrate that being a best in class investor, and by best in class we mean consistently delivering outperformance over the long term, you need to think about sustainability issues deeply, in addition to the kind of fundamental analysis of the market, of the business model, as well as the kind of management teams themselves. So we can write up to $150 million checks. And we have had the privilege of investing in some great companies such as Toast and Asana and DocuSign and Gusto, as well as Backmarket and Vestier Collective. So I'll hand over these two to introduce themselves. Great. Nice to meet everyone. My name is Max. I'm the CEO of Vestier Collective. I joined the company early 2019. So I've been there for four years. The business was founded back in 2009. The core concept of it is that there's a lot of stuff, mainly luxury goods, lying in people's wardrobes. And to change the way we consume, we believe we need to unlock that value and connect buyers and sellers. The business is now present in 70 markets. It's been a unicorn since 2021. And I think we feel incredibly blessed to be in a business that is providing real solutions to the problems that we face globally with regards to consumption and finding climate-positive solutions that consumers can turn to. And I'm Thibault. Very good to be here. I'm a co-founder of Backmarket and the CEO company that we co-founded eight years ago. And essentially, we have the same mission as with Vestier. But we do that with tech products. So our mission is basically to replace the conception of new tech product by the conception of renewed tech. And we do that in 17 countries with Backmarket. So in the US, in Europe, and in Asia. And basically, yeah, same as Max, there is no compromise between business and purpose. It's at the heart of the machine and the engine. So the more we grow, the best it is in terms of impact for the environment. And this is what's, I think, bringing a lot of power of talents within Backmarket and also that can make you as a founder last for the long term. Awesome. And as I said, it's been a pretty long day. And I was trying to think of ways of waking you guys all up so you could hear the wisdom that comes from both Tebow and Max here. I was thinking about making us all seeing head, shoulders, knees, and toes just to kind of shake the cob's webs loose. But Tebow, I think, thankfully, talked me down from that. But a bit of audience participation. So who here has bought something off of Backmarket? Hands up. Oh, nice. A kind of sustainable audience. Sweet. And then who here has been a participant in the Vestier Collective Marketplace? Oh my god, look at that. OK, so I know we all have a slight addiction to our laptops and mobile phones. If you guys do want to look at your mobile phones at any point during this lovely panel discussion, please feel free to download either or both of those apps and be participants in both of them. All right, let's get started. So you both kind of quickly touched upon the pain point that you're looking to address, both for the consumer as well as for the planet. Are there any tidbits or statistics that you have, top of mind, to really drive home this point around the consumer value proposition that you guys both have, as well as the need from a planetary perspective? Max, why don't you go first? Sure. I think, overall, all of us know that we're consuming way more than we should. Over the last 20 years, the number of items worn by people have doubled. If you look at a company like H&M or Zara, they produce $2 billion or $1 billion, respectively, per year. Again, to repeat that, that's $2 billion pieces of clothing being produced by H&M every year. And if you think about the impact that has on the planet, not just from a production perspective and the energy that is used for it, but also from a water consumption for every single T-shirt being used, which is close to 3,000, 4,000 liters, if you think about all the cotton that needs to be grown to produce a shirt, this all results in the fashion industry being the second or third most polluting industry in the world. And I think over the last years, despite a huge focus on sustainability, especially by Generation Z, we all seem to not be able to stop consuming because consumption has gotten fundamentally much, much easier and much, much cheaper. There's reasons why a company like Shane is worth $100 billion. And the business back 10 plus years ago has really said this doesn't make any sense. Because while we continue producing more, we're wearing the clothes that we have less and less. Our estimates are that if you look at our industry, which is luxury fashion, there's north of 1 trillion of pieces lying in people's wardrobes, unworn, unused. I'm sure everyone here, including myself, is guilty in that. And our perspective is this just fundamentally doesn't make sense. Instead of buying two or three or four pieces from H&M or Zara, we're trying to educate people that they should think about the items that they buy and sell and wear as assets, not as consumables. Instead of spending 30, 40, 50 euros on a dress, you're going to wear three times. Why don't you spend more in an item that you know you're going to wear longer, you're going to take care of better, and then might have the chance to resell it. So our business has really been around educating consumers around the asset value versus the consumable aspect of the item. So I think from our perspective, we try to make it as easy as possible for people to sell their items, but also explain to them that they should really look at not just the primary, but also the secondary value of the items that we sell. And when it comes to tech, just to give you overall numbers, so basically worldwide, we're emitting 36 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year. We all know that we need to get that to net zero. So first, slash it in two, then to net zero if we want to survive. I'm talking about our kids, our grandkids. And so when you take a look at tech, it's responsible for basically two billions out of the 36 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year. 80% of these is because of the production of new hardware products, so smartphones, TVs, everything that we're using daily, basically. And those are responsible. The production of those products are responsible for 4% of the global CO2 emission on the planet. So when you take a look at that problem, we said, OK, pragmatically, like, Max, like, are we going to get sober and stop consuming tech? I don't really think so. Like, I mean, people keep on buying tech, keep on using tech more and more. Population is growing, so people are getting more tech, basically. So we took the other approach, which is a bit more pragmatic with back market, which is why people are not consuming reused tech, like circular economy, so used products are not new products. And the first reason is trust, because people like to save money, basically, and to not consume new. But when it comes to a product that is, you know, like the last iPhone is like over $1,000, actually way more than that. And so if you consume used product, then maybe you save 50%. But you are like, oh, is it going to work? Like, really, is it reliable? And so with back market, we've decided to bridge that trust gap between the new industry, which is bringing you a lot of safety as a consumer and the used industry that is not providing enough warranty and so trust. And so back market is basically a marketplace that aggregates professional sellers only in order to offer the best out of the two words for customer. And basically, the main metric for back market, the golden KPI that we track is how much market segment shares do we take out of new? We don't really care if people buy more used stuff. That's great. Like, let's get circular, because you are avoiding the production of the new products. But it's really about getting that market segment share of used product plus refurbished product growing as much as possible in order to lower down the impact of tech, basically. OK, that is a perfect segue into one of the really interesting aspects about both of your business models that I wanted to touch on. And in both of your business models, there are, and you mentioned some of them, these kind of looming, large, very powerful players in both of your ecosystems. So they're the device OEMs in the case of back market. And then there are the luxury brands in the case of Vesti Air Collective. So I think what would be really helpful for this audience to hear is, one, how have they reacted to your success? Because just as we can did, their business models rely on them selling more and more net new products every year. And then secondly, what are the strategies that you guys are using to deal with any reactions that you might be getting from them? So Diva, why don't you go first? OK. I mean, brands, you mentioned it in the questions. Manufacturers of tech products, the best way to make more money on margins and to suit their stakeholders and shareholders is to sell more new product every year. There is no doubt about that. This is how they've been growing for decades, and this is how they keep on growing. The fact that we've, you know, circular economy is growing and is taking more market shares is also something they are looking at closely, because the people shifting from buying new to buying reused and circular economy is something that they don't want to lose customers, basically. And so the reaction that we've seen from manufacturers is that, OK, they started to look at it and then to start to list some refurbished product on the back market as well. So we built Shop in Shop for brands, basically. So you can find some Dyson, some Apple products, some Samsung products on the back market. But it's, I think, a first move from them. It's not like the new big business. Still for the same reason, because selling new with high margins is the best they can do to answer to the system. But if customers are switching more and more to buying circular economy and to renew tech, then they won't have a choice but to embrace this switch. So they are getting ready in case of changing, but they are not pushing in order to change it. So what we do as back markets is, you know, we do as much as possible to educate the customer on the value prop that we're offering in order to switch them from buying new to buying reused. That's one. So that's our daily jobs. That's 95% or 98% of our efforts. And two, we are advocating on the public affairs side, because I think the word we're living is not fair for people. Like, you have no way of fixing your product easily today. You break your screen. Your battery is dead. Every tech product has a battery. A battery is made of lithium. This is dying after a lot of usage, basically. And today, manufacturers are not providing the spare parts to fix the product. They are not providing the technical details in order for people to be able to fix those products. And that's not fair. So we're pushing hard at the European level and the US level on the right to repair. Just enable people to fix their product in order to make them last longer. They don't like that, but this is the way of history. This is what happened to the car industry 30 years ago. And I'm an optimistic person, obviously. But I'm thinking we're making good progress in order to have that in the coming year. OK, great. So you're going after the version of consumers are going to demand this more and more. So the device OEMs are just going to have to get up to speed at some point. And the regulators will play a kind of interesting role at some point, hopefully. At least that's the avenue. Max, is that what you guys are doing? Yeah, I think our business is slightly different, because we are in some sort of ways at the top of the pyramid. And as I explained, we try to educate people to buy better quality and less quantity. So we're not in direct competition with our OEMs, which in our case are Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and the like. In many ways, our competition is, again, more H&M and Zara. And I think the bottom line is we try to engage quite proactively with our brands and tell to them, we actually want to jointly educate consumers to buy your products. Because once they buy your products, we can resell them for you. And we want to educate people to stop buying the fast fashion and move to them. So we've done a lot of work around educating these brands that we are not the competitors. I'm not saying that everyone has understood it, but I think the last two, three years around COVID, fundamentally has so massively raised the awareness around sustainability that these brands, voluntary or involuntary, had to shift their minds in for that. And we're trying to engage quite proactively with them to build solutions that both of us can benefit from. Because fundamentally, they know one thing that we don't know is what's lying in people's closets, because they've sold the items firsthand to these people in the first place. And from our business, one of the biggest challenges we face is getting people to sell the items that they have and trying to make them comprehend what the value of what might be lying in their wardrobe really is. But I think for maybe to put things a bit in perspective, again, why fast fashion versus luxury? We're not trying to educate everyone and saying, hey, I'm sorry, you can't buy Zara, go buy an Hermes bag, which costs 15,000 euros in second hand. But we're really trying to educate consumers that they could go up the consumption period. So instead of buying first-hand H&M, you buy second hand Tizan, instead of buying first hand Tizan, you buy second hand Gucci, instead of buying first hand Gucci, buy second hand Louis Vuitton, and so on. So really educating people to move up to that pyramid and to give people a sense on how big an impact each of you and us can have on this. We've sent the team down to Africa to Ghana, in this case a couple of weeks ago, because Ghana is one of these places where all this fast fashion ends up in the end. You might think that you're recycling it or you might think you're selling it on one of these peer-to-peer platforms which sell very low priced items, but in the end, these items all end up in Africa. In Ghana specifically, which is one of the biggest markets in the world, 15 million items arrive in Ghana every week. Out of those 15 million items, only half get recycled and the rest literally ends up on beaches, on streets, on land. I'm not trying to bum everyone out here. You're doing a good job. But you are destroying the planet, also in your own way. But what you don't find there is you don't see any Louis Vuitton, you don't see any Gucci, you don't see any of these high-end items. So I think what we're really trying to do is bring awareness around that and really bring awareness around the fact that if you buy secondhand, fundamentally you're reducing first-hand consumption by up to 70%. And as a result, which we've just announced two weeks ago, we're now actually climate positive, which means that we're reducing CO2 emission every year, which is a huge achievement for us as a business and something we're very proud of. And we obviously try to use that to educate the brands that we're really partners in improving the consumption, actually help them grow their business simultaneously. So just to pick up on the thread around bumming people out, as you so eloquently put it, bumming people out. So you both have put sustainability at the heart of the kind of customer value proposition and lean into it from a marketing perspective quite a lot. I'm curious to hear if there was any debate internally around whether or not you should have sustainability so front and center of the message or how much to kind of be pushing that on the audiences. Max, why don't we start with you first? Yeah, I think from our perspective, there's no question within the business that it's at the core of our business. We are a circular business and as a result of the sustainable business and personally I'm almost never put in front of a decision between profitability and sustainability but fundamentally the more we do, the better it is. And almost everything in our business that is more sustainable is also more cost effective. I'll give you an example. If you buy from me directly and it's quite easy to find me, it's at Maximillion, I'll probably be the first seller to come up. I've sold maybe 85 items on the platform and we tell people to not have fancy packaging that you would get on a Netapote or any Zalando of this world but we tell them to reuse some of the old boxes they have. So if you buy from me, chances are you get, you're closing from me in a Lego box for my parents, for my kids. So the fundamentally that sustainability is the heart of what we do, no question there. We became a B Corp last year. I mean, this is what we live and breathe every day. With regards to consumer communication, it's a bit more sensitive because most consumers don't want to be bummed out and we've tried things where we've gotten a bit more radical and activist. We had campaigns I think last year or two years ago during Black Friday where we were just showing pictures of these landfills and people don't like it. I mean, I see it as easy for myself. When I post on LinkedIn and I put some sort of activist message and I saying we're polluting the planet, I get X amount of likes. If I post a picture of myself visiting Buckingham Palace, I get 10 times more likes. I mean, consumers are still quite sensitive whether it's conscious or unconscious. So the balance that we strike is quite nuanced. Tiva. When it comes to us, it's a bit the same like I was mentioning like purpose equal business. So the more you grow, the more you sell, the less new tech being sold. To give you a concrete example, the last iPhone is emitting 130 kilograms of CO2 emission to be product manufactured and then until it lands to the end of the customer. When it's refurbished and you change like heavy refurbishment, so battery, screen, you just emit like 20 kilograms of CO2 emission. So you're saving at least 110 kilograms when you're choosing refurbished over new. And so we're also climate positive. Since we started the company and we're proud of that, but it's not a debate, it's just that at the heart of the model, I think it's harder at the company when your business and when your core business is not climate positive to switch it and you try to do site things. And I mean, like it's worth trying, but it's harder. I mean, I'm glad I'm not in that position. And when it comes to customer, you know at the beginning when we launched Back Market, you ask customer like, why did you choose Back Market? And sustainability was like 3%, like between 3% and 5%. So very low in the purchasing decision. And now when you ask you're getting close to 30% of people answering, oh, I did that because I want to consume sustainably. Is that true or not? You know, it's easier to click on. It's because it's sustainable than it was cheaper. So I choose it because of the price. Well, I don't really care until the impact is here, actually, and I also do believe like guilt, like making people feeling guilty is not the way. I think you need to carry on a positive message and we're focusing on delivering a positive message which is not like buy it because it's saving CO2 emission. This is more like an information that we will give to the customer and after sell engage them and to like, okay, you just didn't save money here. You also did something positive for the planet and here is why. And by the way, I want your old phone. I want your old tablet. I've run everything from you that you're not using anymore. Try it again. I think, you know, convenience is everything when it comes to customer. So we're just using the same mechanism which is replacing linear model which are very climate negative by circular model which are way more positive. This is what we try to. And maybe just to build on that, we have seen exactly the same trend over the last two, three years. We've done a study with BCG over the last three years every year and sustainability versus price, the discount you get versus first-hand item has massively increased as a, you know, primary decision-making driver for consumers. And we've seen that spike especially over this summer, you know, like everyone else, you know, 2022 is not as easy as 2020 was from an e-commerce perspective, but for some reason we saw our business massively accelerate over the summer even in some of the homegrown markets where we've been for 10 plus years like France. And that's really been directly tied to, you know, some of these, you know, very dramatic weather events that we've seen, you know, in Europe, especially in France over the summer with droughts, fires, floods, you know, you name it. And we've seen that directly translate into sales as sad as that might be. Great. And just to pick up on something that you said, Tivo, which was you feel sorry for the people who have to retrofit this back into an existing system. I mean, to be clear, we at Generation think the same thing about investing. There are plenty of investors out there that are trying to retrofit kind of ESG and sustainability at the core of what they're doing. And I think just like consumer brands, there's an authenticity that comes when it's right from the foundation and in the soul of the kind of company itself. Okay, Max, you touched on kind of recent trading and momentum that you guys were seeing at least over summer. And I'm sure it's kind of the elephant in the room right now that we are heading into pretty volatile kind of macro situation. I'd be curious to hear, and if you have any advice here for folks, what are you seeing in terms of the impact that that's having right now on your company and any tangible bits of advice that you have received that you thought incredible? I need to pass that on. So please pass it on. Yeah, I mean, it is absolutely the elephant in the room. And I think to reflect on it a bit further, probably 80, 90% of our teams, my colleagues, have never seen a recession. Most of my teams are younger than let's say 35, 32, 30. I think I've asked in a town hall back in June, July how many people were already in the workforce during the dot-com bubble bursting. I think it was me and another five people. Then I asked how many people were there during the financial crisis in 2008, 2009. And I think maybe it was another 30. So we're talking about less than 10% of the overall staff. So the whole understanding like how bad this could get, especially given that this crisis is really a combination of the dot-com bubble bursting and the financial crisis, being in a stacked flation environment is pretty scary. So for me, the hardest part, of course, we all have to make the trade-off between growth and profitability. And personally, I think it's a very healthy journey most of us are going through because fundamentally, we want to run profitable businesses in the future. And some of these fundraisings over the last one or two years and some of these environments where people just got given money to spend, which spoiled consumers, spoiled also employees, were just a bit out of whack. But I think the hardest part has really been bringing the team along on that journey because they've just never seen it. They didn't know what that meant. And in many ways, they didn't want to know it. I mean, I've held a speech back in June, July where I saw that despite repeated town halls and emails, me telling everyone, this is getting really bad, you know, party's over. I didn't see a real change in behavior, so I had to go in front of the whole team and I fundamentally had to make them face the question is, do they actually want to know the truth? So I had two pieces of paper on a table and I asked them which speech they wanted to hear. I had one prepared where I would tell them everything is great and everything's going to be fine and the party's just about to restart. And the other one was I'm going to tell you the truth and you're going to be a bit scared and bottom line is I'm also a bit scared. And they all said they want to hear the truth, but then when I told them the truth, they all got scared. You know, it's a really difficult situation because whoever tells you right now, they can predict the next two, three months or even the next two, three years is from my perspective, full of shit. I think we've seen a lot of investors both in the public and private market being incredibly wrong. I think you've seen a lot of CEOs, including myself, who've made very, you know, bad decision or wrong decisions, you know, less than six, nine months ago. So I think it's an environment which just requires a huge amount of shift. From my perspective, I think a certain, you know, muscle memory helps, you know, having been around the previous two crisis. So I think, you know, interacting with people who've been in crisis and were around, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, you know, has really helped. I mean, let's also not forget that if you wanted to buy a house in the 70s and the 80s, you know, four, five, 6% interest rate, you know, was normal. So I think it's really around learning from people who've been in similar situation to predict as much as you can how the future might look. Tivo? Well, on our side, I mean, like, yeah, word is changing very fast. I mean, look at the past three years, COVID, and then know this. But I think for me, when it comes to internal communication, which is similar to external, like, look at the mission, look at the tailwinds, like inflation, like, you know, people are going to look at their money, like badly, like, they are going to look for alternative. They are looking for alternative to save money, to make sure they have the same level of pleasure, that they can have a future, that they can have some vacations, et cetera. So we're answering to that. Second thing, elephant or mammoth in the room, climate change. So we've been there this summer in the US, in Europe, everywhere, it's warming up. We need to do more, we're less, we need to get this CO2 emission down. So this is what we do, you know, and I'm just saying to team, we need to be proud of us at the end of the day, you know, so we do our max internally and everything that we don't control, we will never, so just focus on what we can do and that should stay the same. And the all-profitable new paradigm, I think is very healthy as well. I mean, you know, it's the only way to last forever, so. To be truly sustainable, there you go. Well, thank you guys so much. A big round of applause for Max and Tivo, please. Thank you.