Kierto has gone AWOL

It looks like Kierto is missing in action for the rest of the year – but you can return the Kierto items to our brick & mortar store as usual. Kierto second hand products are not visible on the website at the moment.

We missed the mark on communicating this in advance, as we tripped over our feet while launching the new webstore.

Where in the world is Kierto?

Kierto has been our circular economy program, where we buy back used Varusteleka products from our customers. The customer gets compensated with store credit, and we resell the product through our webstore. Usable products get a new life and another customer hopefully finds what they are looking for in good condition, yet at a cheaper price.

In the midst of our webstore revamp it dawned on us: there’s quite a lot to do to get Kierto back up and running, which means money, time and effort – and that lead to us re-thinking if the concept (as it is) is worth spending all those resources on!

We like the Kierto buyback program and would like to hold on to it. However, the volume is tiny, less than a percentage of our sales. On average, it has meant around a thousand products annually going through Kierto.

The small sales alone are not the problem, as we enjoy the opportunity to offer that service, even if it is not that profitable. Unfortunately, in its current state, it requires way too many resources. Instead of a breakeven, we are currently running it at a loss, and that is hard to justify.

What happens next?

Kierto has been around for five years without any massive changes, and we saw its current hiatus as an opportunity to rethink it and its future. If we can make it work and worth our while, we’d love to offer this service to our foreign customers as well. 

We asked for your feedback and the consensus seemed to be that Kierto is a valuable service for you. So we are now trying to figure out how to do this better in the future. Nothing is ready yet, but hopefully we will have some news for you in the fall. We’ll keep you posted – and we would appreciate any feedback or ideas you have on the current system.