Arkipakkaus – Everyday necessities and recycling in one package

Arkipakkaus - Everyday necessities and recycling in one package

A Loop Venture called Arkipakkaus was formed together with Kesko, Unilever Finland, Metsä Tissue, Encore Ympäristöpalvelut, Enexus and Orthex. Arkipakkaus was a pilot for monthly subscription model to buying everyday necessities such as toilet paper and detergents. The model included delivery of the products and take out for the plastic waste. The pilot was organized in May and June 2019.  

Mission behind the Arkipakkaus concept was to make consumers’ every day life easier with a new kind of service. We know that there is a will to recycle plastic waste amongst consumers but the way to do it in practice isn’t easy enough. We wanted to make recycling more approachable and convenient by combining it with subscription model of everyday items. This kind of business model requires collaboration across traditional borders. These companies were ready to create a circular loop which opens doors to create new innovative ventures. 

This venture is an excellent example of collaboration between big corporations. Kesko provided the subscription model, Metsä Tissue and Unilever the sustainable products. Encore Ympäristöpalvelut and Enexus were the ones organizing the take out for the waste and Orthex gave a second life for the plastic packages. Facilitating and testing a new business model isn’t always a piece of cake but in this case seamless teamwork enabled fantastic results. 

To sum up, this pilot was a success and it indeed motivated consumers to recycle more than before. Arkipakkaus was a great opportunity to learn about new service models catering several consumer needs as well as corporations’ collaboration. Circular loop with a wide variety of companies can make a difference! 

Record breaking cross-functional team: Reima’s venture went from planning to first buyers in 8 weeks

Record breaking cross-functional team: Reima's venture went from planning to first buyers in 8 weeks

Here’s a challenge to the rest of our LOOP Venture teams: Reima Play just broke all the records for fastest time-to-market! Admittedly, they had done a lot of pre-work, studying benchmarks and creating first hypothesis of the newly launched Reima Play service before the Play team really started working together. Nevertheless, in the beginning of January we were still deciding on some of the core guidelines of the service and managed to get first paying customers on the first days of March. That’s quite the speed for entering a market with a new business model. Furthermore, the first release of the service exceeded a lot of its goals from conversion rates to customer demand. This is a great start to keep working, validating the service with customers! In a recent retro for our first launch, the team – a combination of Reima experts and external support, including LOOP Venture builders – felt unanimously that the secret to exceeded results was good communication and clear goals. “We all knew what had to be done and did it. Not once did anyone have to double-check if something was done, it was simply done” we agreed. The team had a clear focus on tasks and their priorities. With very little management and extremely light documentation, we managed to deliver what we needed daily, week after week. The first release of Play was a true test of “Lean Corporate” methods used in LOOP Venturing. A way of delivering like a startup while reporting to regular corporate governance and delivering quarterly value. Not an easy task to achieve, but something we now feel certain can be achieved in all of our LOOP Ventures. Reima Play is a service for parents with small children, helping them buy the top-tier outdoor clothing hassle-free. In Reima Play, customers subscribe to a monthly fee, fill in information about their kids and receive automatically the right set of clothing throughout the year. Packages vary from overall only to full set of gloves, shoes and mid layers. Reima Play also helps parents re-sell the used garments, eliminating yet another cumbersome task from families’ daily chores. Reima Play is a case of moving towards a Product-as-a-Service model. The vision is to achieve a circular business where the clothing is all returned to Reima, enabling reuse, recycling and re-manufacturing of the clothing. In the first released version of the service Reima validates the customer need for an annual service to support families in the chore of clothing their children for some real outdoor fun. Next, recycling and refurbishing by Reima’s partner Emmy, emmystore.com, will be explored. There are still a million things to solve, but for now Reima seems to have found real customer interest and we will continue the good work to make the service even better – together with the first pilot customers. If this is the result of first eight weeks, what will be showcased after three months in World Circular Economic Forum 2019? Stay in the LOOP to find out! Images are screenshots from Reima Play in March 2019.

Circular Solutions Start By Seeing Opportunities Where Others See Problems

Circular Solutions Start by Seeing Opportunties Where Others See Problems

Our economy has been working in an inherently linear way for the past several decades. However, the buy-use-discard-repeat consumption mentality is slowly changing amongst consumers. Likewise, an increasing number of executives are starting to see the benefits of the circular economy in their own industries:

“We are now building a circular economy – a new economic model in which, for example, consumption is based on using services – sharing, renting and recycling – instead of owning things”, says Mari Pantsar, Director of Carbon-Neutral Economy at Sitra.

It’s been estimated that switching to a circular economy model from the current linear style could bring net savings of €600bn to European companies, with market potential calculated to be over 3 billion euros annually in Finland alone. Every single corporation, company and startup should want a slice of it.

Collaboration is Key

Circular economy and its related knowledge contain enormous potential for economic growth. It opens new pathways for both vertical and horizontal cooperation. To make the switch to circular economy, the market needs new products and services.

While large corporations have the financial and technological capital to be the forerunners in circular solutions, they often encounter challenges in bringing new innovations to the market. This is where corporate venturing comes into play. Corporate-startup collaboration has been seen to have a positive impact on company performance and also the capability to work on open innovation projects. Corporations can build systems and structures to find, match and cultivate the right startups that quickly bring new solutions to the market. From the startup’s point of view, the upside comes as increased visibility and improved reputation, accelerated business development and access to new markets.

Switching to circular economy means finding completely different ways of production, consumption and destruction. That is why cooperation between different market players at different levels of the production and distribution process is crucial.

We need to start seeing opportunities where others see problems.