A glimpse into my everyday life: You can hardly see it. It’s a difficult balance ­because you should ­ideally be able to spot it. At least a little. The right person must be able to see it, while everyone else should rather just walk past.

I have hidden a bag in the hedge. Tucked it under the green leaves. In the winter, it’s a more complex discipline. Then I must think more about the appearance of the bag. It should preferably be a bag that is not particularly noticeable. And if people finally see the bag, they’d instead think it’s trash. A bag without contents, thrown randomly into a random hedge, which people therefore leave alone.

But nothing about this bag is ­random. My bag today contains a cap. Two days ago, a similar bag hid a Barbie doll, and the week ­before, a candlestick. The cap in today’s bag is waiting to be picked up by the DBA buyer.

The cap was for sale for 150 Danish kroner, but the buyer haggled me down to 100 kroner and gained my trust in the deal. I wasn’t at home when it suited him to stop by and to be sure not to lose the deal, I placed the sun-shading headgear in the hedge. Then the buyer can come by whenever it suits him. This way my DBA shop is open 24/7.

Camouflage is needed

It feels a bit silly to hide one package after another in the hedge, especially when some of my neighbours are watching. They must believe that I deal in shady matters. If only they knew that I don’t run a covert business, but on the contrary, it’s something that helps “clean up the planet” by selling second-hand and lining my wallet with the help of old Barbie dolls. My business is not shady, but some degree of camouflage is required.

There are a few hours to go until the cap and its new owner are united and I receive a money transfer. In the meantime, I cycle off to work. A job which is at… yes, you guessed it: DBA.

DBA is common ownership in Denmark. Eleven million goods were put up for sale in 2022 on the trading site for the 5.9 million people who live in Denmark.

Majken from marketing, who sits three chairs down from me in the Copenhagen office, also practices DBA as a hobby, a passion, and a holiday income. This morning, she went out of her front door, and with her, a bag that contained three bibs for babies.

As a press officer for DBA, my job is to get people to remember and ­discover DBA, while Majken’s job is all about making sure that the messages about the benefits of using DBA reach the right target group at the most ­advantageous times. Although the positive arguments for buying and ­selling used goods are gradually ­sitting on the spine of most Danes, DBA does not “sell” itself. There are competitors. Facebook Marketplace, Trendsales, and various vintage apps are emerging and specialising in several categories.

A big pie

Fortunately, the pie is big enough for all. In Denmark, 80% have bought second-hand within the past 12 months, and the number has increased dramatically in just one year, up from 76% last year.

This is partly due to the economic crisis. There are a lot of new ads for caps and baby bibs on DBA now. Last year, 27% of Denmark’s population answered that they had sold one or more things via DBA within the past year. This year, the figure has grown to 39%. It only makes the sum of everything you can find on the portal even more exciting.

On DBA you can acquire anything from a stuffed lion to a used bicycle. Among some of the more specta­cular items that have been for sale are an old cannon, a replica of Mr Bean’s car, a live hammerhead shark and a ­folding moped. And it is precisely this wide range that makes DBA special. DBA is all of Denmark’s marketplace.

And it is precisely this wide range that makes DBA special. DBA is all of Denmark’s marketplace.

The company was founded in 1981 and was initially just a physical newspaper with advertisements. It was inspired by the Swedish news­paper of the same variety, called Gula Tidningen (The Yellow Paper), and therefore the Danish model came to be called Den Blå Avis (The Blue Paper).

In 1995, Den Blå Avis came online and was called DBA.dk. Until 2008, the Danish entrepreneur Karsten Ree managed the enterprise. Karsten Ree became famous in Denmark in 2008, when he sold his life’s work, DBA, to eBay for a billion Danish kroner. Since then, Karsten has only become ­richer, but he and DBA remain inseparable. Every time he embarks on a new entrepreneurial adventure, or his company submits accounts, DBA is mentioned.

“DBA… isn’t that the business that Karsten Ree runs?” Almost everyone asks that when you tell them you work for the blue trading site. Or they launch into an anecdote about a sewing machine they just sold, or a time when the buyer was nicer than expected. DBA, therefore, has an extremely strong brand, but by the same logic this makes it difficult to move. Even if we want to push it just ten centimetres.

Internal unity

A reputation that we don’t want to lose is that of our internal ­community. The unity among the employees has been the special sauce behind DBA’s success, and the social part is still very important to us. We are good at ­meeting every Friday at the Copenhagen office, where there is a small Friday bar. And the participation rate is high for the annual Christmas lunch when the Copenhagen office travels to Aarhus for a joint event.

We all eat lunch at the same time, and when the weather is good, we sit outside and enjoy our food – and each other’s company. We celebrate birthdays and we eat cakes. Our two “office mothers,” Lise-lotte and Lene, also try to entice us with fruit and toasted dark-rye (rugbrød) snacks.