After making products durable enough for their intended use and encouraging proper care, the next step in extending the product’s useful life is repair. But business and consumers alike continue to ask, “what’s in it for me?”

Historically we produced far fewer and more expensive products – and people took care of the ones they had. Extending the product’s life was therefore a very prudent financial decision, and repair was a crucial and ordinary part of a product’s life cycle.

Fast-forward to today, characterized by a market flooded with cheap products, shorter and shorter use phases, and large amounts of waste.

Sarah Case co-authored the paper “Managing Complexities of Repair Service Offerings – A Study of the outdoor textile industry.” For her, the re­turn to repair is one of the “key elements” towards solving the circular economy puzzle:

“Repair plays a core role in enabling the circular economy. It keeps garments in use that may other­wise go to downcycling or landfill.”

Starting from a position of strength

Legislators are beginning to agree that the circu­lar product is one that’s repairable. The so-called “Right to Repair,” for example, is becoming an important cornerstone of the EU’s Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles and is already seeing VAT reductions for repair going into effect in some countries.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legisla­tion is also in the works in many countries that would make manufacturers responsible for their product’s end-of-life management. This would essentially incentivize them to design products that last longer, which means designing for repair-ability. Legal pressure combined with consumer expectations will, it is hoped, help squeeze low-quality products with comparatively high environmental impacts out of the market.

Many outdoor brands, meanwhile, have long prided themselves on their extensive warranties, and indeed have been repairing their products based on this quality guarantee for decades. This is one of many reasons that, compared to other segments of the apparel industry, Sarah Case sees the outdoor industry as already occupying a strong position in terms of repairs:

“It already makes high-quality products and spends a lot of time figuring out ideal balances between function and strength. And not to men­tion the strong sustainability ethos within the outdoor community at large.”

At first glance, outdoor gear repair also seems fairly straightforward, whereby the typical repair journey looks like this: A consumer brings a dam­aged product to a point-of-contact such as a brand store or retailer that sends the item to a profes­sional for repairs, sometime in-house, often third-party. Once finished, the item is thereafter returned to its owner.

So, if repair is essential to the circular economy and Outdoor has many of the prerequisites in place for success in this field – repairable products and a motivated community – one might be forgiv­en for thinking that this should be a quick win.

Repair is not a quick win

Where things get problematic is that each step of the above “repair journey” go completely against the grain in terms of the dominant fast-fashion, unidirectional, and globalized workforce reality. Take the consumer level: Why wait for an item to be repaired when an affordable – and brand new – replacement is available right now? Stores, meanwhile, are meticulously set up to move things as efficiently out of the shop as possible, not process items coming the other way. And expensive repair workshops occupy valuable floor space in their stores and warehouses that could otherwise be used to sell more products. And finally, while repair may not be complex, it is complicated. Each fix is different, so there’s no way to automate it and the skills required are rare outside of Southeast Asia. Even if (and it’s a big if) consumers had the patience to wait for the round trip that this would require, transport alone would likely negate much of the environmental savings repair has to offer.

Repair’s Return on Investment

All three levels have conspired to make it far easier and more cost-effective to replace a product rather than repair it. One of repair’s greatest unanswered questions has therefore become “what’s in it for me?” Sarah Case believes that there is no one single answer to this question, but suggests that her research did reveal what may be the key approach to achieving success in repair:

“Each brand is doing this for their own reasons, so success in repairs now depends on different definitions. Profitability is still a huge challenge, and most just hoped to break even. But what about repair’s value in terms of meeting sustain-ability goals, gaining customer loyalty, and collecting product design feedback? These are hard to measure, but are crucial considerations when calculating repair’s return on investment!”