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For Retail Leaders & Commercial Directors

Your marketing team gets emails. Your ESG team gets data. Your stores get a poster.

Product take-back is already happening in your stores. The only question is whether you're capturing value from it. Utilitarian turns that moment into a customer acquisition channel and a compliance data source — with no operational burden on store teams.

One programme, three outcomes
Marketing
Email capture at €2.72 with brand, model, and category data attached. A new owned channel at a fraction of paid media cost.
Sustainability
Product-level take-back data for CSRD and EPR reporting. Auditable traceability from consumer to circular outcome.
Operations
Deploys with a poster. ~20-second customer interaction. No app download, no staff training, no IT integration required.
Inside a modern sporting goods store with take-back programme
 
Live in INTERSPORT RunnersWorld EK Sport
The Situation

Take-back is already happening in your stores. You're just not capturing value from it.

Customers bring in old products. Store staff put them in a box. The box goes to a recycler. A weight figure comes back. That's it — no email, no product data, no follow-up, no measurable return.

Meanwhile, your marketing team spends €12–31 per email through other channels, and your sustainability team reports aggregate weight because that's all they have. The same moment could serve both teams — it just needs a data layer.

€0

value captured per take-back today

€40+

annual value per email subscriber captured

€2.72

cost per email through take-back with Utilitarian

How It Works

A poster in-store. A 20-second customer interaction. Two business cases solved.

Customer sees a poster, scans a QR code, enters their email, selects their product, and receives a reward. Done. No app download, no staff involvement, no IT integration.

In that interaction, you capture an email subscriber at €2.72 (vs €12–31 through paid channels) with product data attached — brand, model, category. That same data feeds CSRD and EPR reporting. One moment, two outcomes, zero operational complexity.

Scales from 3 stores to 1,500. Deploys in four weeks with a poster refresh.

→ No app download required — QR to mobile web
→ No staff training — the customer self-serves
→ No IT integration — works standalone or with CRM export
→ Branded or white-label experience
→ Ethical recycling standards required — non-negotiable
Deployment
Poster refresh · 4 weeks
Store effort
Zero — customer self-serves
IT requirement
None — standalone or CRM export
Scale
3 to 1,500 stores
Customer interaction
~20 seconds
QR scan → email → product select → reward.
What You Get

One programme that serves marketing, sustainability, and operations

Most programmes serve one team and create work for the others. This one delivers measurable value to both marketing and ESG — without adding operational burden to stores.

📧

Email capture at €2.72

Your marketing team gets a new owned channel that captures emails with product data attached — at a fraction of what paid social, popups, or loyalty programmes cost.

📋

CSRD & EPR data

Your sustainability team gets product-level take-back data — brand, model, category — structured for compliance reporting. Auditable from day one.

🏪

Zero store burden

Deploys with a poster. Customer self-serves via QR code. No staff training, no app, no IT integration. Store teams don't need to do anything differently.

📊

Product-level insight

Know what your customers are discarding — by brand, model, and category. Data that no other channel provides, useful for merchandising, CRM segmentation, and lifecycle analysis.

🔄

Customer loyalty driver

Customers receive a reward and a reason to return. Retailers running the programme see repeat take-back visits — a loyalty behaviour that no discount code creates.

♻️

Ethical recycling built in

Works alongside your existing recycling partner. We require responsible processing standards — ethical circular outcomes are a condition, not an aspiration.

What Retailers Say

Simple to run. Proven in-store.

"The steps were self-explanatory. Customers responded positively. Customers are very curious about what actually happens to the shoes."
Wim · Entrepreneur, Intersport Ermelo
Inside a sporting goods store with take-back programme
"The combination of simplicity, customer engagement, and data-driven transparency is what makes this approach stand out. This is exactly the direction our industry needs."
Ron Bruinenberg · Retail & Expansion, EK Netherlands
"We even see customers coming back specifically to hand in their shoes and collect their reward — which shows the system is working very well in terms of building loyalty and repeat visits."
Rowen Slagter-Pormes · Management, RunnersWorld Hoorn

Questions retail leaders ask

"My stores are already stretched. We can't add more work."
Store teams don't do anything differently. The customer scans a QR code on a poster, self-serves on their phone, and hands in the product as they already do. There's no staff training, no new process, no device to manage. The programme runs on a poster and a QR code.
"We tried a sustainability programme before and it didn't stick."
Most sustainability programmes struggle because they create operational complexity without demonstrating commercial return. This one deploys with a poster refresh and generates measurable marketing ROI from day one — email subscribers at €2.72 each, with product data attached. When a programme pays for itself, it earns ongoing support rather than relying on goodwill.
"How does this scale to 100+ stores?"
The programme is poster-based and QR-driven — there's no hardware, no app, and no per-store configuration. Scaling from 3 stores to 1,500 means printing more posters. The platform handles multi-store data, store-level reporting, and centralised programme management out of the box.
"Who manages this day to day?"
Once deployed, the programme runs itself. Customers self-serve, data flows automatically, and your marketing and sustainability teams access dashboards and exports on their own schedule. There's no daily operational management required. We handle platform updates and support.
"What happens to the products after take-back?"
Most retailers already have a recycling partner — and we work alongside them. The platform captures customer and product data at the point of take-back; your existing recycler continues to handle processing. We require that recycling partners meet responsible processing standards. If you need a recommendation, we can connect you with trusted partners.
"Is this a sustainability project or a marketing project?"
It's both — and that's the strategic advantage. One interaction delivers an email subscriber for your marketing team and auditable take-back data for your sustainability team. You don't need two budgets, two vendors, or two programmes. The commercial return justifies the sustainability investment, and the sustainability data enriches the marketing channel.

See what this looks like for your store network

We'll walk you through the programme, the business case for marketing and ESG, and what deployment looks like for your specific retail environment.

Book a Demo →