Talking from experience, when we receive a package from my family or friends, it usually comes in a new box they bought for the occasion, or in an old cardboard box they had around - did they keep it on purpose or were they too lazy to bring it to the recycle bin? Anyway, those boxes might last two rounds, top.  

Find out how we worked together with Matkahuolto to allow private consumers to ship goods in reusable packaging in Finland!

Matkahuolto's challenge: Replace existing cardboard packages with reusable packaging

What if everyone, and not only businesses, could easily have access to reusable packaging for shipping out private parcels?

When Matkahuolto approached us with this thought, we took on the challenge immediately.

The objective for collaboration with Matkahuolto and RePack is to develop a new service offering with reusable packaging, bringing together Matkahuolto's contract customers, e-commerce businesses and consumers.

This plan comes when single-use packaging has become a climate problem, and there's a great need to reduce the amount of packaging we use and improve the reuse and recycling of packaging.

The solution: Matkahuolto allows its private customers to purchase reusable packaging as any other parcel

We worked closely with Matkahuolto to develop a model where the RePack package could be bought by private consumers and used for their private shipments while managing the return cycles.

The collaboration enhances Matkahuolto's service offering, marketing efforts and makes Matkahuolto a forerunner in circular logistics.

How does it work in practice?

Since April 2020, RePack has been available on the website of Matkahuolto.

Whether occasional online vendors or simple private individuals want to ship something to a friend, they can now simply choose a reusable packaging RePack at matkahuolto.fi, as any other parcel.

If an individual receives a parcel in a RePack, they have two options:

• They can reuse the packaging for a new shipment and benefit from a reward.
• If they don't need spare packaging, they can simply return the empty package to the closest Matkahuolto return point.
  

Results

Not great. The customer journey to choose RePack in the website differed from all other packaging products and the result was that hardly any RePack packages were selected. Service offering was not iterated at all and the project was quietly shut down. Project proved that enthusiasism and belief in circular packaging solutions is not enough. If, or should we say when, the first version (MVP) does not work the service needs to be evaluated and tried again, it's the only way to learn. We still believe there is a use case and a business case for peer to peer pacakging in recommerce.