Reusable packaging pioneer says it is leaving fashion e-commerce after more than a decade and will focus instead on circular systems for refurbished electronics.
Finnish circular economy company RePack is shutting down its reusable packaging service for fashion e-commerce, bringing to a close more than a decade spent building what it describes as the world’s first reusable packaging service for online retail.
Founded in 2011, RePack developed reusable shipping bags designed to be returned and reused rather than discarded after a single delivery. Over the years, the company worked with more than 300 brands and retailers across Europe and North America, including Zalando, H&M, Inditex, and Amazon.
“There was no ‘Reusable packaging’ category in e-commerce when we started,” RePack wrote in a recent announcement. “We were the first to build a reusable packaging service for e-commerce.”
RePack Says Reuse Delivered Results
The company stressed that a lack of environmental benefits or customer acceptance did not drive its decision to leave fashion e-commerce. RePack said reusable packaging has the potential to reduce carbon emissions by up to 80% while eliminating packaging waste. It also reported that recovery rates improved over time as customers became more familiar with the return process, describing the transition as a behavioral change that required time and repetition.
“The data was unambiguous: given enough time, the results came,” the company stated.
RePack also highlighted its Net Promoter Score of 79% and said participating consumers tended to spend more and shop more frequently than average customers. The company noted that several major retailers trialed or adopted the system and that it received positive feedback from both consumers and warehouse employees.
The company also argued that e-commerce continues to generate growing amounts of packaging waste because packaging remains largely invisible to consumers. Unlike shopping in a physical store, where consumers often choose whether to purchase a bag, online shoppers rarely see packaging as a purchasing decision until it arrives at the doorstep.
Infrastructure, Not Packaging
A major theme running throughout RePack’s announcement is the distinction between packaging and the infrastructure required to support reuse.
According to the company, operating a complete reuse loop involving transportation, returns, cleaning, and refurbishment costs roughly ten times more than a conventional single-use mailer. However, RePack argued that this was not a failure of the concept itself.
“But that cost was not a flaw in the idea,” the company wrote. “It was a flaw in the infrastructure.” RePack said making reuse cost-competitive requires return points, consolidation hubs, refurbishment capacity, and the supporting logistics needed to circulate assets efficiently. The company said it had been “running a circular service on top of a linear system,” relying on carriers, return points, and last-mile logistics networks that were originally designed for one-way movement.
The company also stated that it lacked access to the capital required to build the infrastructure needed to make reusable packaging the default option rather than a voluntary alternative selected during checkout.
The Limits of Opt-In Sustainability
RePack also pointed to the challenges of offering reusable packaging as an optional choice during the checkout process. According to the company, some retailers saw approximately one-third of customers select reusable packaging while others experienced adoption rates below one percent.
Consumers typically paid for the service directly, which often meant RePack was cost-neutral or even less expensive for retailers than single-use packaging. However, the company said the variability in participation made long-term planning difficult.
“You cannot build a business on that kind of variance,” RePack wrote. The company compared the situation to airline passengers voluntarily purchasing carbon offsets, arguing that sustainability programs dependent on individual checkout decisions can be difficult to scale consistently.
RePack also suggested that the business environment had changed significantly after the pandemic. According to the company, sustainability initiatives received greater attention before COVID-19, but supply chain disruptions, inflation, geopolitical uncertainty, and cost-of-living pressures shifted corporate attention toward immediate financial concerns.
As an example, RePack cited comments made by an H&M representative at the Sustainability in Packaging conference in Barcelona last year. “Before Covid, they had many goals,” RePack wrote. “Today they only care about packaging innovation if it reduces costs. Immediately.”
The company argued that sustainability increasingly became a secondary consideration as retailers focused on controlling costs and navigating economic uncertainty.
Criticism of PPWR
RePack also expressed disappointment with the final version of the European Union’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR).
According to the company, earlier proposals included a requirement that 40% of e-commerce packaging be reusable by 2030. RePack said such a target could have supported the development of large-scale reverse logistics networks, refurbishment infrastructure, and other systems needed to support reusable packaging across Europe.
The company argued that the final regulation took a different direction and that bags and boxes used for most e-commerce shipments were excluded from the reuse requirements that had originally been proposed. “The things that actually fill your bin are now legally ignored,” RePack wrote. RePack described the outcome as a major setback for reusable e-commerce packaging and said it could delay development of large-scale reuse infrastructure.
Business Pivot to Refurbished Electronics
Although the company is ending its fashion e-commerce service, RePack is not abandoning circular business models. Instead, it plans to focus on reusable systems for refurbished electronics and other higher-value products.
According to the company, the economics are fundamentally different when packaging is used to protect products such as smartphones and other electronic devices moving through repair, refurbishment, trade-in, and resale channels. In those applications, packaging serves not only a sustainability function but also helps protect valuable assets.
“In fashion, we were fighting for pennies against trash,” RePack wrote. “In tech, we are protecting assets.”
The company said the lessons learned from more than a decade of operating reusable packaging systems will now be applied to building circular solutions for the refurbished technology sector. “We know why loops break,” RePack concluded. “We know how to fix them. We just needed a circle worth designing.”
Rick LeBlanc, EMBA, is the founder and editor of Reusable Packaging News (subscribe to the free newsletter) and editor of Western Pallet Magazine. A supply chain journalist with more than 30 years of experience, he specializes in pallets, reusable packaging, material handling and related operations. Rick is co-author of Pallets: A North American Perspective and Pallets & Progress: A Collected History of Pallets and Palletized Handling 1922–1945. He is also an advisory board member of the Virginia Tech Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design. Read Rick’s full bio.