With a circular life in a linear industry, RePack comes as a sustainable solution to a real-world problem.
Our reusable packaging has been co-created for users, by users.
In 2010 sustainability consultant Jonne Hellgren and industrial designers Juha Mäkelä and Petri Piirainen combined their skills and founded a sustainable design agency Peruste with a goal to create less crap solutions that would not create more crap products to the world.
One of the customers was the Finnish Post office. We spent countless hours in the warehouse, seeing the rise of e-commerce and single-use packaging that goes with it.
Juha Mäkelä had an epiphany. “Why don’t we implement the bottle deposit return system to e-commerce”?
Other Founders, Petri and Jonne, were not impressed by Juha’s idea. “Another crazy idea from Juha”. It took months from Juha to convince others to explore it but eventually the idea proved too strong.
Slowly we started working on it during our evening shifts over a beer. How would the packaging look like? How is it returned? What about the business model? Who would use it? Does it exist.
Packaging sketches were drawn and euro coins were circulating from hand to hand when figuring out a circular economy business model.
In Finland, we had grown up with the bottle return system. It’s part of the culture. Everyone uses it and we felt this model should be applied to other forms of packaging. It’s not like reusable packaging didn’t exist. It just didn’t exist in e-commerce.
The idea grew on us and, eventurally, was too strong for our weak minds. e-commerce packaging to be the same. Convenient and easy to return, rewarding and environmentally friendly. Not an easy task that flattens into letter size when empty and was returned to any postbox in Finland with prepaid return label.
The packaging was a complete failure. It was not reusable at all.
But luckily we had a note inside the box to get feedback and we discovered that people loved the idea. Really loved it. They gave a score of 9,5/10. So the packaging didn’t work but concept did. That’s when we realized we were onto something here.