“I can’t see any significant growth over the next few years,” says Stryjak. “Other companies have caught a bit to make things more durable and sustainable and repair, and with consumers a key driver still prices and brand. Fairphone will have its loyal fanatic basis, but I can’t see this significantly expanded soon.”
“No one wants to pull a dead horse”
We put Fairphone the idea that it may have to make Pootling along with this same niche public. “I’ll say it’s nonsense, right?” Raymond van Eck, Fairphone’s general manager, told Wired.
“I would never start at a company … if we felt there is no potential. No one wants, as we say in the Dutch, pull a dead horse to see if it would walk.” Fairphone is based in Amsterdam, and Van Eck was appointed Director General in August 2024.
“In the next five years, we really have the intention of quadrupling our addressable market and take our fair share of it,” says Van Eck. The company also set a goal of “double digital growth” only for this year. The obvious question: How?
Part of Fairphone’s strategy is of course seen in Fairphone 6 itself. It has some good ideas like a slide that puts the phone in an essential mode. This reappears the interface to help you get out of the distractions of, for example, social media.
It’s a very thin lifestyle angle here that fairphones didn’t have before. And Fostering, which was part of the Rebrand, which the company started at the beginning of 2025, which included Binning the rigidly looking, all-cap companies of an old company for something a little friendlier.
The fairphone repair
Van Eck says it is about “changing the order” of priorities, putting the device itself at the position, instead of the ethics it represents. “In the end, it also explains Fairphone’s vision, as the Rebrand has given us a more friendly, more accessible identity,” he says. “It’s a little less paternalist.”
The message is that Fairphone is not just a phone for ECO -Warriors. And leading technology officer Chandler Elizabeth Hatton suggests that image, this classic Fairphone message, may have actually proved to disapprove of some.
“When we market the device, we do not lead with that. Not in our advertising campaigns, not in our communication, and not the way I would like to hand it over to you,” says Hatton. “It can become preaching in some markets. That message resonates less now. There are people who are in panic, but also completely exhausted by the climate crisis or questions about ethics.”
So … is it time to de-wake up Fairphone? This seems too blunt interpretation, as there is no indication that Fairphone plans to dilute its standards. It simply does not claim them so abundantly.
Turning off the volume
“Fairphone was founded 12 years ago, essentially to deal with the social and environmental problems embedded in the electronic industry,” says Van Eck. “What we also saw is that Fairphone was quite located about telling that story … which meant that the Fairphone was for a smaller addressable market.”
This new approach also involves not having an over -bold take on things like Aiwho because of its Environmental effect could be seen as antitetic to one part of the old fairphone message.
