Literally.
There was no "Reusable packaging" category in e-commerce when we started. We were the first to build a reusable packaging service for e-commerce. The ones who believed a delivery bag should and could be returned for reuse, not thrown away after one use. For over a decade, we lived in that loop.
Today, we are shutting down the RePack service for e-commerce fashion.
We are not going to give you a pivot story full of corporate jargon. We are going to tell you the truth. After ten years in the trenches, we have enough scar tissue to know when a system is broken.
The Innovation Was Real
This was not a failed lab experiment. Reusable packaging in e-commerce works. It has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions by up to 80% and eliminate trash entirely.
When you shop in a store, you see the packaging. In many countries, you pay for your bag at the till. The cost is visible, and the choice is yours.
When you shop online, the packaging disappears into the transaction. You never see it, never choose it, never pay for it directly. But it still ends up in your bin.
Europe generates around 190 kg of packaging waste per person each year, a figure that has risen steadily over the past decade alongside the growth of e-commerce. We are buying more online than ever before, and every order arrives in a box nobody asked for, and nobody chose.
Why is that still considered normal?
RePack worked with over 300 brands and retailers across Europe and North America. The biggest names in the business, Zalando, H&M, Inditex, and Amazon, all trialled or used RePack to deliver consumer goods, with great reviews from consumers and warehouse employees.
The longer retailers used the system, the more familiar their customers became with it. Recovery rates kept climbing over time. This is about behaviour change. It does not happen instantly. But the data was unambiguous: given enough time, the results came.
RePack users were also the best customers for the retailers. They spent more, and they shopped more often. They were the dream demographic.
Our Net Promoter Score was 79%. In the world of logistics, that is the equivalent of a standing ovation.
On Sustainability
The honest answer to when reuse becomes sustainable is: it depends entirely on what you are replacing.
A small plastic mailer is so cheap to produce and so light to ship that reverse logistics and refurbishment simply cannot compete with it on carbon. One loop rarely beats one throwaway bag of that size.
But scale up the packaging, and the calculation flips quickly. The bigger the bag or box, the more material, energy and emissions go into producing it. Reuse one larger box even once, and you are already ahead of the throwaway system.
The case for reuse was never universal. It was always about finding the right context, the right product, the right size. We knew that. We were building toward it.
The Price of Common Sense
In ten years, the phrase we heard more than any other was: " This is a great idea”. We heard it from investors. We heard it from legislators. We heard it from retailers who would look us in the eye and say, "I would personally use this, but I don’t think our customers want it."
Even if pilot data showed the opposite the resistance remained.
At some point, a great idea that nobody acts on stops being a great idea and starts being a mirror. It shows you exactly how broken the system is.
So why stop?
Let's talk about money.
In fashion e-commerce, we were competing against pennies. A single-use plastic bag is cheap. A paper mailer is cheap. Running a full RePack loop, the shipping, the return, the cleaning, the refurbishment, costs ten times that of a single-use bag.
But that cost was not a flaw in the idea. It was a flaw in the infrastructure.
We were running a circular service on top of a linear system, using the same carriers, the same return points, the same last-mile logistics that were built for one-way movement.
To make reuse genuinely cost-competitive with single-use, you need to build the circular infrastructure first. The return points, the consolidation hubs, the refurbishment capacity.
That takes capital. Capital we never had access to.
So instead of making RePack the standard, brands made it an option at the checkout.
Consumers paid for it, which meant RePack was often free for the retailer.
In many cases cheaper than single-use.
It looked good on a website. It ticked the sustainability PR box, but not much else.
The opt-in model made our most important customer touchpoint completely unpredictable. Some retailers saw a third of their customers choose reuse. Others saw below 1%.
You cannot build a business on that kind of variance.
When people fly, less than 0,1% voluntarily pay to offset their flight emissions, and checkout sustainability runs on exactly the same psychology.
You cannot scale a system when the decision to use it is embedded in someone else's checkout flow.
The Priority Shift in Business
Before the pandemic, there was ambition. Sustainability had a seat at the table.
Then came the chaos. Covid, supply chain madness, the cost-of-living crisis, and war. Suddenly, the table got smaller, and we have ambiguous net-zero targets 20 years from now.
Now sustainability is a priority that comes after every other priority. In private, retailers say it plainly: price is the only thing that matters.
Last October, at Sustainability in Packaging in Barcelona, a representative from H&M stood on stage and said it clearly. Before Covid, they had many goals. Today they only care about packaging innovation if it reduces costs. Immediately.
That is not a place for innovators. It is a place for bean-counters.
The PPWR Betrayal
We did not build this system because we saw legislation coming. We built it because we saw the problem.
E-commerce was accelerating, packaging waste was climbing, and nobody was treating the two as connected. We believed there was a better way, and we set out to build it.
To our surprise, legislators agreed. When the PPWR, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, began taking shape, the targets were genuinely ambitious.
Europe ships around 10 billion parcels every year. The original proposal would have required 40% of e-commerce packaging to be reusable by 2030.
Four billion reusable units in circulation, each making multiple journeys, each replacing a growing pile of single-use waste. That is not a regulation. That is the birth of an entirely new industry.
Reverse logistics networks, refurbishment infrastructure, and consolidation hubs across every major market. Tens of thousands of jobs. A supply chain built for the circle rather than the bin.
The single-use industry saw the same numbers and spent accordingly. The PPWR is said to be the most lobbied piece of legislation in the world. Ever. And the lobbying worked.
The final result? The 40% target applies if you ship goods in drums, rolls, or canisters.
Bags and boxes, 99.9% of e-commerce packaging, are excluded.
The things that actually fill your bin are now legally ignored. This legislation has pushed reuse back another 15 years. And the industry that could have been built around it, the one we were already building, was stopped before it started.
The Legacy
We are stepping away from fashion e-commerce with our heads held high.
We created the category. We were on the Paris Fashion Week catwalk. We sold upcycled RePacks at Selfridges for 300 euros a piece. We inspired dozens of other reuse startups.
We did not fail because the idea was wrong. We failed because we tried to build a 21st-century circle in a 19th-century linear system.
A More Honest Circle
Now we take our scar tissue to refurbished tech.
In fashion, we were fighting for pennies against trash. In tech, we are protecting assets.
When a customer ships a 500 euro iPhone for trade-in, they are not looking for a sustainable option. They are looking for trust. If you ask them to put that device in a flimsy envelope, the loop breaks before it even starts.
We know why loops break. We know how to fix them. We just needed a circle worth designing.