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Stephanie Regni and Bon Marché

Overview

Stephanie Regni is best understood through a through-line: she builds practical ways for people to waste less without making sustainable living feel punishing, niche, or joyless.

Before Bon Marché, Regni founded Fillgood, the East Bay refill business that helped Berkeley and Albany residents reduce single-use plastic through household and personal-care refills. Public sources now describe her as Fillgood’s founder and former owner, not its current owner. After selling the business, she co-founded Bon Marché with Sarah Bly, shifting the same zero-waste instincts from packaging to the wider problem of things sitting unused in closets, garages, and kids’ rooms.

Bon Marché is not just a flea market with better branding. It is a curated, neighborhood-scale pop-up in Albany, California, built around second-hand goods, repair, reuse, and community. The name matters: in French, bon marché can mean a good deal or affordable, and literally suggests a good market. That double meaning fits what Regni and Bly are trying to make: a place where second-hand shopping feels useful, social, and desirable.

Who is Stephanie Regni?

Regni is originally from France and has a background in environmental science, according to California Copenhagen Collective, the project behind Bon Marché. Her public work has centered on a specific kind of sustainability: helping ordinary households close the gap between what they value and what they can realistically do.

That was the premise of Fillgood. When Regni started the business online in 2017, refill culture was still unfamiliar to many Bay Area shoppers. Berkeleyside later described Fillgood as Berkeley’s first refill shop and the first so-called zero-waste store in the East Bay. The model was simple but behaviorally difficult: instead of buying a new plastic bottle every time a household ran out of soap, detergent, or body care, customers could refill containers or receive products in reusable packaging.

The point was not only to sell greener products. It was to make a lower-waste routine convenient enough that people would actually keep doing it.

From Fillgood to Bon Marché

The connection between Fillgood and Bon Marché is direct. In an Albany Gazette interview with Regni and Bly, Regni described the link as a natural one: Fillgood focused on reducing single-use plastics in daily life, while Bon Marché focuses on items people already own but no longer need, including clothes, accessories, home goods, toys, and games.

That shift matters because waste is not only about bottles, bags, and packaging. Clothing, household objects, children’s gear, furniture, and impulse purchases all carry material costs. New products require raw materials, water, energy, transportation, labor, packaging, and storage. When the item is barely used and then discarded, much of that value is lost.

Bon Marché tries to interrupt that pattern before it becomes landfill. It gives sellers a structured way to part with quality items and gives shoppers a more appealing way to buy second-hand. In that sense, it is the same mission Regni pursued with Fillgood, applied to a broader category of consumption.

What Bon Marché is

Bon Marché is a curated pop-up second-hand market in Albany, California. Its public materials describe it as a market for amateur sellers, meaning people do not need to be professional vintage dealers to participate. The typical stand fee is kept low when possible, often around $50, so families, neighbors, collectors, creatives, and first-time sellers can join.

The market is intentionally broader than a clothing swap. Sources connected to Bon Marché mention clothing, accessories, home goods, toys, games, kitchen items, kids’ gear, repair, dyeing, mending, upcycling, and local environmental partnerships. That mix is important. A household rarely has only one kind of surplus; a useful reuse market needs to absorb the messier reality of how people actually live.

Bon Marché also has a clear standard: bring good second-hand things. Its selling guide encourages useful, desirable items and discourages stained, dangerous, broken, adult-only, food, live, or intentionally bought-for-resale goods. That curation helps distinguish the market from a dumping ground. It asks sellers to think about quality, condition, presentation, and whether an item genuinely deserves another life.

Why it is different from a conventional flea market

Bon Marché borrows inspiration from European second-hand culture, especially Danish loppemarked markets and French ideas around making reuse feel normal, stylish, and affordable. Bly’s Copenhagen experience shaped the original market concept; Regni’s French background helped transform the working idea into Bon Marché.

The result is a market with several goals at once:

Make second-hand desirable. Presentation matters because people are more likely to choose used goods when the experience feels attractive rather than apologetic.
Keep access broad. A low stand fee makes room for amateur sellers instead of limiting the market to professionals.
Reduce waste locally. Goods stay in circulation inside the community instead of being shipped, stored indefinitely, or discarded.
Support repair and reuse skills. Bon Marché has featured repair, mending, dyeing, upcycling, and other hands-on ways to extend the life of objects.
Create a social space. The market is designed as a neighborhood event, not only a transaction.

That last point is easy to underestimate. Selling online can be efficient, but it is often isolated, tedious, and impersonal. Bon Marché turns reuse into something public and relational: sellers talk with buyers, neighbors run into one another, children see second-hand selling modeled as normal, and objects leave with a story instead of disappearing into a donation stream.

Why Albany is part of the story

This is Albany, California, not Albany, New York. The distinction matters because Bon Marché is tied closely to the East Bay city where Regni and Bly live, volunteer, and raise their families.

The Albany Gazette interview frames Bon Marché within Albany’s 15-minute city ethos: a small, walkable community where people can fold a local market into daily life rather than treating it as a destination event. Regni and Bly also connect the market to Albany’s climate goals, especially the idea that reducing emissions means thinking about the embodied carbon in goods and materials, not only transportation or electricity.

That makes Bon Marché a practical climate action project at neighborhood scale. It does not ask residents to solve global supply chains in one purchase. It asks them to look first at what already exists nearby.

What Stephanie Regni brings to Bon Marché

Regni’s Fillgood experience gives Bon Marché a specific strength: she understands that sustainable behavior depends on friction. People may care about plastic pollution, textile waste, repair, and overconsumption, but if the alternative is confusing, inconvenient, expensive, or aesthetically unappealing, many will default to buying new.

Fillgood attacked that problem through refills, reusable packaging, product selection, education, and local delivery. Bon Marché attacks it through curation, event design, seller guidance, repair partnerships, and a market format that makes reuse feel social instead of sacrificial.

Her role also helps explain why Bon Marché is not framed as anti-consumption in a simplistic way. The market still involves buying and selling. The difference is what kind of consumption it encourages: fewer new goods, more durable goods, more local circulation, and more care for objects that already exist.

What to know before attending or selling

If you want to attend Bon Marché, expect a pop-up rather than a permanent store. Event dates, locations, and formats can change, so the most reliable path is to check California Copenhagen Collective’s Bon Marché page or join its mailing list.

If you want to sell, the basic idea is straightforward: bring quality second-hand items you are ready to let go of. The market is designed for amateur sellers, and stand costs are kept much lower than many professional markets when venue economics allow. Sellers should plan for presentation, pricing, setup, and the emotional work of parting with things that may still carry personal meaning.

The best fit is not everything you want out of your house. It is the good stuff: the dress someone else will actually wear, the lamp that still has life, the children’s gear another family can use, the kitchen item that has been waiting for a second act.

The bigger idea

Stephanie Regni’s move from Fillgood to Bon Marché is not a pivot away from zero waste. It is an expansion of the same argument.

Fillgood made it easier to stop treating plastic packaging as inevitable. Bon Marché makes it easier to stop treating unused goods as clutter with only two endings: storage or disposal. Both projects are about changing defaults. Both depend on design, convenience, trust, and community. Both assume that sustainability works better when it feels good enough for people to repeat.

That may be the most useful way to understand Regni’s work. She is not only telling people to consume less. She is helping build the local systems that make less-wasteful choices feel ordinary.