Please tell us about yourself in the context of your software and give a brief intro to the software.
I’m Einar Michaelsen, Founder & CEO of Circular. I’ve spent over a decade building and leading teams across tech, strategy, and innovation, with a strong focus on AI and automation since 2016.
While co-founding Cirkulær, Norway’s fastest-growing curated second-hand retail chain, we experienced firsthand how challenging resale operations can be. Every item is unique, which makes traditional retail systems inefficient and unscalable.
That’s why we built Circular, the AI-powered resale software that helps retailers, brands, and resellers manage, automate, and scale their resale operations profitably and with ease. Circular streamlines everything from intake and pricing to inventory management and payouts, making it simple for businesses to tap into the rapidly growing $264B resale market.
We have basically built our own dream software. Being able to solve your own problems is so rewarding. Now we want to help other resellers grow their business using our best-in-class software.
What was the core reason behind developing this software?
The core reason was unit economics.
When we built Cirkulær, we quickly learned that resale is fundamentally different from traditional retail. Every item is unique, which means high handling costs per unit. From intake and pricing to labeling and payouts. At scale, these costs completely erode margins, making resale nearly impossible to run profitably with standard retail tools.
We built Circular to fix this. By leveraging AI and automation, we drastically reduce the cost of handling each item, improving sell-through rates and enabling sustainable per-item unit economics. This turns resale from a high-cost, manual side project into a profitable, scalable business model for retailers and brands.
How is your software different from other alternatives available in the market? How does it benefit your customers?
Legacy consignment software is designed for unique items, but it relies on manual data entry and outdated workflows. This creates high handling costs per item, which limits resale profitability and scalability.
Circular is different because it’s AI-powered. Instead of staff typing in every detail, our system automatically identifies category, color and brand, and suggests an optimal price, making intake up to 15× faster. Our machine learning model for pricing items learns from your specific inventory and sales data, and will reduce the key person risk when it comes to pricing. All your staff should be able to price items correctly.
The result for our customers:
• Better margins. Drastically lower handling costs improve unit economics.
• Faster scaling. Staff can process thousands of unique items without increasing headcount.
• Smoother experience. Smarter pricing, and improved sell through rate for the products you sell.
Where legacy systems manage resale, Circular makes it scalable and profitable.
Which industries do you cover in general? Are there any specific industries that are more beneficial using your software?
Right now, we focus on the fashion and apparel resale market, primarily second-hand clothing, footwear, and accessories. This industry benefits the most because it faces some of the biggest operational challenges:
• Every item is unique, with no shared SKUs.
• High volume of intake and turnover.
• Thin margins, where handling costs can quickly erode profits.
Circular is built to solve exactly these problems by lowering the cost per item through AI-powered automation, making resale profitable and scalable.
In the future, our platform will expand to other verticals with similar challenges, like electronics, sporting goods, and home/interior - any market where single-SKU inventory and resale complexity are barriers to growth. We are planning our first pilots outside apparel in Q3 2025.
For now, apparel is where our customers see the fastest ROI and strongest competitive advantage.
What are the core features of your software that make your product stand out in the competitive market?
Circular is designed to solve the profitability and operational challenges of resale, automating the most time-consuming steps and optimizing the entire product lifecycle.
Our standout features:
1. AI-Powered Intake: Instantly identifies category, color, brand, and pricing from images, making intake up to 15× faster than legacy consignment tools.
Impact: Staff can process thousands of unique items without scaling headcount.
2. Dynamic AI Pricing: Suggests optimal prices based on historic sales- and inventory data to maximize revenue while hitting ideal sell-through timelines.
Impact: Higher margins and reduced unsold inventory.
3. End-to-End Product Lifecycle Management: Circular is built around the end-to-end resale process.
- Booking: Sellers book drop-off appointments.
- Intake: Items are processed and labeled with AI automation.
- Active Sale: Products are tracked live in-store or online.
- Post-Sale: If sold, sellers are notified and balances updated in real time.
- Pickup or Donation: If unsold, sellers are reminded to pick up items or approve donations to the store.
Impact: Every step is streamlined, with automated notifications and a real-time seller portal to keep sellers informed and reduce staff follow-up work.
4. Payout Tracking & Seller Requests: Circular tracks what each seller is owed and allows them to request payouts self service.
Impact: Simplifies financial tracking and eliminates manual spreadsheets.
5. POS & E-commerce Integration: Syncs inventory with Zettle, Extenda Go, and Shopify to support true omnichannel resale.
Impact: Retailers can sell seamlessly in-store and online.
6. Analytics & Reporting: Provides insight into sell-through rates, revenue, top selling categories and brands, and sustainability metrics.
Impact: Data-driven decisions and ESG reporting made easy.
Legacy consignment software manages resale. Circular goes further. Automating workflows and optimizing every step to reduce handling costs, improve unit economics, and make resale scalable and profitable.
How do you justify the value of your software compared to its cost?
Circular directly improves our customers’ unit economics.
Resale has a fundamental challenge: every item is unique, which makes handling costs very high. With legacy systems, staff must manually process each item, from intake to pricing to payouts, eating away at margins.
Circular automates and optimizes these steps. For example, our AI-powered intake makes processing items up to 15× faster than legacy consignment software. This means retailers can handle thousands of items with the same staff, dramatically lowering the cost per item.
The ROI is clear:
• Lower handling costs → higher profit margins on every sale.
• Higher sell-through rates → fewer unsold or donated items.
• Reduced admin work → less time spent on spreadsheets and follow-ups.
Our software typically pays for itself within weeks, because even a small increase in operational speed and sell-through translates into tangible bottom-line gains.
Simply put, Circular isn’t a cost, it’s a profitability engine that turns resale into a scalable, sustainable business model.
And - we only get paid when the stores get paid. Our usage-based pricing ensures that we succeed when our customer succeed.
How will you keep up with new technology and customer requirements?
We stay ahead by focusing on three key areas:
1. AI-First Innovation: Circular was built from the ground up as an AI-driven platform. We continuously upgrade our models for intake and pricing to further reduce handling costs per item and improve sell-through rates. As new technologies emerge, like computer vision for defect detection or authenticity checks, we integrate them quickly to keep our customers at the forefront of resale innovation.
2. Customer-Centric Development: Our product roadmap is shaped directly by customer feedback and collaboration. We work closely with retailers and brands to solve their real-world challenges. For example, our complete seller journey workflow, from booking and intake to sale, pickup, or donation, was co-designed with early customers like Cirkulær and Fretex Kuratert. We invite all customers to participate in WhatsApp group where they can provide direct feedback to our team.
3. Continuous Delivery Through SaaS: Circular is a cloud-based SaaS, which means new features and improvements are delivered seamlessly. Our customers always have access to the latest technology and updates without costly migrations, downtime, or manual upgrades.
By combining cutting-edge AI, close customer collaboration, and frictionless updates, Circular ensures retailers stay ahead of both technology shifts and evolving consumer expectations, keeping resale scalable and profitable for the long term.
Where will you see your software in the next 10 years, and what are your future plans for that?
In 10 years, we see Circular as the global backbone for resale, powering millions of unique items flowing through circular retail systems every day.
Our mission is to make circular business models as seamless and profitable as linear retail. In the next few years, we’ll focus on scaling in the fashion and apparel resale market, helping retailers and brands turn resale into a core growth engine. Once established, we’ll expand into other verticals with similar challenges, like electronics, sporting goods, and home goods.
Long-term, Circular will evolve from a SaaS platform into a global resale infrastructure, connecting retailers, brands, and consumers. This includes launching a unified marketplace, where in-store quality-assured items from Circular-powered retailers can be sold online, giving consumers a trusted, seamless way to buy secondhand goods, and Circular-powered retailers an extra channel to drive revenue growth.
Imagine a world where every item has a digital identity, and when a customer resells through any Circular-powered store, that item can be tracked, priced, and sold instantly across both physical and digital channels.
Our vision is simple:
• For retailers → resale becomes scalable and profitable.
• For consumers → secondhand is as easy and trusted as buying new.
• For the planet → waste is reduced, and circularity becomes the default.
By combining AI automation, data-driven insights, and global connectivity, Circular will help reshape retail to be smarter, more sustainable, and truly circular.
What steps are you taking to adapt your product for a mobile-driven world?
Resale is a mobile-driven activity. Sellers and staff need to interact with the system on the go, in-store, or even at home. That’s why we’ve designed Circular to be fully responsive and mobile-optimized from day one.
Key steps we’ve taken:
1. Mobile-First Seller Portal: Sellers can book appointments, track their items, get real-time notifications, and request payouts directly from their phones. No desktop required.
2. In-Store Mobile Tools: Staff can process intake using mobile devices or tablets, scanning labels and adding items quickly without being tied to a computer.
3. Lightweight, Fast Interfaces: We’ve built a modern web app that feels like a native mobile app, ensuring fast load times and a smooth user experience, even in lower-connectivity environments.
Looking ahead, we consider introducing progressive web app (PWA) features and offline capabilities, making Circular even more seamless for teams and sellers working in-store or on the go.
Our goal is simple: make every step of the resale process accessible, real-time, and frictionless, wherever users are.
What are your efforts for maintaining software integrity and regulatory compliance?
Maintaining software integrity and regulatory compliance is fundamental to how we operate at Circular, especially because we handle sensitive data from both retailers and individual sellers.
1. Data Security & Integrity
- We use a modern, cloud-based architecture (Vercel + Supabase) with secure authentication and role-based access controls.
- All data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and we follow strict backup and monitoring routines to ensure uptime and prevent data loss.
- Our development process includes automated testing, code reviews, and continuous deployment, so every release is stable and secure.
2. Regulatory Compliance
- Circular is fully GDPR compliant. Sellers have complete control over their data, with clear consent flows, transparency around usage, and easy data deletion/export options.
- We only collect essential data, such as name, email, phone number, and optional bank details, and never share it with third parties without consent.
3. Retail & Financial Transparency
- While we track seller balances and payouts, we don’t process payments directly. This keeps us compliant while providing a full audit trail for our customers.
- Our reporting features give retailers the documentation they need for accounting, tax reporting, and ESG disclosures.
By combining secure engineering practices, privacy-first design, and clear audit trails, Circular ensures that both retailers and sellers can trust our platform to be safe, compliant, and reliable as they scale their resale operations.
Could you explain how you create and sustain healthy relationships with your customers?
We see our customers as partners, not just users of our software. Our approach to building and sustaining relationships is centered on collaboration, transparency, and continuous value delivery.
1. Deep Collaboration During Onboarding
We don’t just hand over software. We work closely with customers that request it to design their resale operations for success.
- Mapping their current workflows.
- Setting up processes for intake, pricing, and seller communication.
2. Continuous Feedback Loops
Our product roadmap is shaped by customer needs.
- We gather feedback through regular check-ins and shared Slack/WhatsApp channels.
- Many of our most impactful features, like the end-to-end seller journey workflow, were co-created with early customers like Cirkulær and Fretex.
- This builds strong relationships while ensuring our product always solves real-world problems.
3. Proactive Support & Transparency
We provide real-time reporting and clear insights, so customers always know how their resale operations are performing.
- If there’s ever an issue, our team communicates openly and resolves it quickly.
- Sellers also have full visibility through the live seller portal, reducing stress for both staff and end users.
4. Driving Measurable Results
Nothing builds trust like ROI.
- When a customer sees intake become 15× faster, unsold inventory drop, and margins improve, our relationship strengthens naturally.
- We focus on outcomes, not just features.
By combining hands-on partnership, transparent communication, and tangible results, we create relationships that grow stronger over time, turning our customers into long-term champions of Circular.
What is the biggest challenge that you have faced, and how did you overcome it to make your software successful?
Our biggest challenge was perfecting the seller journey. The end-to-end experience for people selling their items.
Resale is unique because you’re not just serving buyers, you’re also serving sellers. If the seller experience is confusing or inconsistent, stores drown in manual follow-ups, sellers lose trust, and inventory quality suffers. Early on, we saw this with Cirkulær, our own second-hand retail chain:
- Sellers didn’t know what to bring or when to drop it off.
- Staff spent hours sending emails, reminders and managing pickups.
- Unsold items piled up, creating chaos and unhappy customers.
We solved this by designing Circular around the full product lifecycle, with automation at every step:
- Booking: Sellers schedule drop-offs and receive clear instructions.
- Intake: Staff process items quickly with AI-powered tools.
- Active Sale: Sellers get real-time updates as their items go live.
- Sale Notifications: Instant alerts when items sell, with balances updated automatically.
- Pickup or Donation: Automated reminders when items need to be picked up or can be donated.
All of this is connected through a live seller portal, giving sellers transparency while drastically reducing manual work for staff.
By making the seller journey seamless, we turned a major pain point into a competitive advantage. Stores now deliver a premium, trusted resale experience while running operations at scale and with healthy unit economics. This was the turning point that made Circular successful.