Dacby Sees a ‘GameStop Moment’ for Refurbished Electronics in India

India’s refurbished electronics market may be headed for its own “GameStop-style” narrative shift, according to Dacby Founder and CEO Ayush Chauhan, who believes consumers will increasingly embrace certified pre-owned gadgets as a conscious lifestyle choice rather than merely a way to save money.

The company, which began with gaming consoles, has since expanded into cameras, MacBooks and iPhones. “Over the next five years, we don’t want to be known as a gaming company at all. We want DACBY to be the name people associate with recommerce electronics as a category—gaming, cameras, laptops, phones, all of it,” Chauhan told IBTimes SG.

Refurbished Devices and the Trust Factor

Chauhan said the biggest misconception remains the belief that a refurbished device is “somebody’s problem device that they got rid of.” In practice, he noted, much of Dacby’s inventory comes from routine upgrade cycles, such as customers trading in perfectly functional iPhones for newer models.

He added that customers have defied his initial expectations. Rather than seeking the lowest price, buyers increasingly demand detailed information such as battery health, shutter count and thermal history.

According to Chauhan, shoppers “pay more for certainty than for the cheapest option on the page. That’s the opposite of what I expected when we started.”

Building a Moat Through Specialization

As competition intensifies with larger marketplaces expanding their refurbished offerings, Chauhan argues that Dacby’s advantage lies in deep expertise in a narrower set of premium devices. Instead of carrying every model, the company focuses on higher-value SKUs where precise grading significantly affects margins.

We’re going deep on fewer, costlier SKUs, even within categories like phones and laptops, we’re not trying to carry every model, we’re focused on the higher-value devices where grading accuracy actually moves the margin needle. That discipline yields better grading accuracy, lower returns, and higher realized resale prices, because premium buyers pay for certainty exactly where it is hardest to deliver, like a camera’s sensor life or a console’s thermal history.

He said this strategy produces better grading accuracy, fewer returns and stronger resale values. Each device certified by the company also adds to its proprietary grading data and repair know-how, creating what Chauhan described as a compounding competitive advantage that generalists, whose data is spread across hundreds of models, may find difficult to replicate.

Lessons After Shark Tank India

Reflecting on the company’s appearance on Shark Tank India, Chauhan said the most valuable takeaways came from the judges’ questions and feedback during the pitch. While the show brought widespread attention, he stressed that publicity alone did not drive the business forward.

After the show aired, we got a lot of attention too, but that attention wasn’t the business. Once it settled down, we took what the judges pointed out and shifted our focus to profitability, going through our margins, our returns, our costs category by category. That focus is what actually made the company profitable.

From Gaming to Recommerce Leadership

Chauhan sees a strong parallel between GameStop’s transformation into a community-driven brand and Dacby’s own ambitions.

GameStop showed how a brand can build a passionate community around it and become something bigger than the category it started in. I see a real parallel there for us. We started in gaming consoles, but that’s not what we are today or where we’re headed. We’ve already expanded into cameras, MacBooks, and now iPhones.

Over the next five years, Chauhan said he wants consumers to view DACBY not as a gaming company, but as the defining brand for recommerce electronics as a whole.

He believes the perception of refurbished products is already changing, much as secondhand fashion evolved from a compromise into a statement about consumption.

In his view, buyers increasingly seek “a certified, trustworthy device without the waste of buying new” and “that’s less a discount mindset and more a lifestyle one, and it’s the direction we’re building DACBY toward”.

Betting on Premium Refurbishment

Looking ahead, Chauhan expects right-to-repair legislation and growing concern over e-waste to make refurbishment a policy-favored sector. He said artificial intelligence is already helping Dacby improve grading accuracy by analyzing diagnostics and repair histories to identify potential failure points.

For us, AI’s role is mostly behind the scenes, in grading accuracy, using device diagnostics and repair history to spot failure points early.

The company’s boldest wager, he added, is its continued focus on premium, high-value devices despite a widespread belief that refurbished electronics succeed only through high-volume, low-cost sales.

Our thinking is that certification and trust matter even more on higher-value devices, because the cost of getting it wrong is bigger. That’s the space we’ve chosen to build in.

For Dacby, that conviction is shaping a long-term push to redefine how Indians buy used technology and potentially to rewrite the story of refurbished electronics itself.