The call that started this

Here is the type of story to look for: A retailer receives a Thuiskopie penalty letter. They know they have the right invoices somewhere — they bought the devices legitimately, they have the supplier records — but they cannot find the specific documents fast enough to respond within the 28-day window. They pay the penalty because gathering the evidence feels impossible under time pressure. The penalty is somewhere between €4,000 and €40,000. The documents existed. The money did not have to go.

If you have a real version of this — a client conversation, a pilot user, someone you spoke to before you even built anything — that is the anecdote. It does not have to be dramatic. It just has to be true.

The problem is not laziness. It is structure.

Most Dutch SME retailers running on Refurbed or BackMarket are not disorganised people. They are fast-moving operations dealing with return flows, marketplace disputes, supplier invoices, and compliance letters, often simultaneously, often with a small team.

The documents exist. They are in email threads, in downloaded PDFs, in accounting systems, in shared folders with names like "BackMarket invoices 2023 FINAL v2." Nobody intended chaos. It arrived one urgent situation at a time.

And the cost is not abstract. It shows up as a Thuiskopie assessor (the body that administers Dutch copyright levies on electronic devices) who asks for invoice evidence and gets no response in time. A BackMarket dispute that goes unresolved because the right shipping record takes three hours to locate. An hour every week re-finding information that somebody in the business already found last month.

These are not technology problems. They are structural ones. And they have a structural fix.

Why existing tools did not cut it

Enterprise document management systems exist. They are expensive, they take months to implement, and they were built for teams with dedicated IT support and someone whose actual job is to maintain the system.

Search tools exist too. But searching across an inbox, an accounting system, a shared drive, and a marketplace portal at the same time is not something a general search tool handles well. It is also not how anyone wants to spend a Tuesday afternoon.
What Dutch SME retailers actually need is something that knows their context. Something that understands that "the invoice for that BackMarket return in November" is a real query with a real answer, findable in seconds rather than an afternoon.

That is what Verbrio is built to do.

What Verbrio actually does

Verbrio is an AI-powered document search and retrieval tool built specifically for Dutch SME retailers.
Connect your documents, invoices, supplier records, marketplace correspondence, compliance letters, and Verbrio makes them searchable in plain language. Ask a question the way you would ask a colleague. Get the document, or the relevant section of it, back immediately.

We built it for refurbished device retailers because that is where the compliance pressure, the marketplace complexity, and the document volume hit hardest and at the same time. Thuiskopieheffing assessments, Refurbed reconciliation, BackMarket disputes. Not hypothetical use cases. What our pilot users deal with every week.

We also built it with European data sovereignty as a baseline, not a selling point. Your documents stay on European infrastructure. For a small business handing over seven years of commercial records to a piece of software, that has to be a given.

Built by a small team, shaped by our customers

We are a small team, and we think that is an advantage. Every feature we build comes from a real conversation with a retailer who told us exactly where their day breaks down. We are not guessing at the problem from a distance.
That also means we are deliberate about what we build next. We do not add features because they look impressive. We add them because a specific business, in a specific situation, needed them and could not work without them. That is the only filter that matters to us.

If you are a Dutch SME retailer and you have a document problem that Verbrio does not yet solve, we want to hear about it. The best version of this product gets built with the people who use it, not ahead of them. Reach out directly and tell us what your week actually looks like.
Tamsyn Dodds
CEO, Verbrio

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