RePack and the EIC Accelerator: Reusable Mailers, Sold and Shelved

RePack is the trading name of a Helsinki company that spent fifteen years trying to make online shopping work like a bottle deposit: the parcel arrives in a sturdy mailer, the customer folds it to letter size, drops it in any postbox, and the bag is cleaned and sent out again. The legal entity behind it was registered in 2011 and carried the name Plan B From Outer Space Oy, which is how the European Commission listed it, until 7 May 2021, when it became Original RePack Oy, according to the Finnish trade register. The company's websites, originalrepack.com and later repack.com, have always used the brand.

In the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, the company won a grant-only award for "Reuse as a service", a plan to scale RePack across Europe. The Commission's list of selected companies names "Plan B From Outer Space Oy" in Helsinki as the only beneficiary of the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,780,362.50 towards a total cost of €2,564,375, from 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2022. Seven years after the selection, the reusable mailer for fashion e-commerce is gone: the business was sold in 2024, and in June 2026 RePack announced it was ending the service.

Where RePack Stands Now

Two things have to be kept apart: the company that received the grant, and the RePack business. In May 2024 oceansix future paths, a Canadian-listed recycling and manufacturing group, announced that its subsidiary Oceansix S.L. had signed "an asset purchase agreement" to acquire "the business of Original RePack Oy" for a total consideration of CDN $2,392,912: 24,948,840 new oceansix shares, 15,282,176 of them at closing and the rest in up to four instalments, plus USD 108,000 in cash, according to the company's press release and Packaging Gateway. The shares went to RePack's shareholders; the deal needed TSX Venture Exchange approval.

The legal entity stayed in Finland. Original RePack Oy is still on the trade register with no liquidation or bankruptcy entry, but it left the employer register on 30 September 2024, its registered line of business is now management consultancy, and its accounts for the period to June 2025 show revenue of €64,000 and no employees, according to the YTJ register and Suomen Asiakastieto. On 2 September 2026 a new company, RePack Trading Oy, was registered at the same Helsinki address, care of Jonne Hellgren, the YTJ register shows. What it will trade is not public.

The service the EU funded has ended. On 22 June 2026 RePack said it was withdrawing from reusable shipping packaging for fashion e-commerce, blaming weak regulation and the slipping priority of sustainability in retail, and offered its remaining bags for sale, Packaging Journal reported. RePack's own farewell page puts it more bluntly: "We failed because we tried to build a 21st-century circle in a 19th-century linear system." The brand now sells packaging, reverse logistics and analytics for trade-in and resale of refurbished electronics, according to repack.com and the University of Bologna's packaging innovation database, which names the phone refurbisher Swappie as a client. Neither the June 2026 announcement nor the RePack website mentions Oceansix, and whether Oceansix still owns the RePack business could not be verified.

The Technology: A Deposit Bottle for Parcels

RePack is less a material invention than a service. The mailers are made from recycled polypropylene and designed for at least 20 uses, according to the Finnish innovation fund Sitra and the CORDIS project article. The retailer pays per use; the shopper returns the empty bag free of charge by post or, in later trials, at a shop, and gets a voucher, loyalty points or a refunded deposit. Oysho, an Inditex brand, charged a €4.95 deposit, the CORDIS article says. RePack cleans and checks the bags and returns them to circulation. The company claims up to 80% lower carbon emissions than single-use packaging; the CORDIS article cites a 2021 study for the Fashion for Good initiative that found a footprint up to 82% lower than single-use plastic mailers.

The weak point was always cost. Posting each empty bag back individually gave RePack global reach without its own infrastructure, but "does not offer any economies of scale", the CORDIS article notes, which is why the project tested in-store return points where hundreds of bags could be collected at once. RePack's farewell page says a reusable system cost ten times as much as single-use bags.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The proposal described a service already proven at small scale: technology readiness level 7, 50 brands in 14 countries, about 30,000 shipments and €200,000 of service revenue in 2018. Its goal was to scale RePack "to replace single-use packaging". The final periodic report, covering November 2020 to September 2022, is unusually frank. It says new packaging designs, cleaning methods and return channels were built and tested "in thousands of cost-efficient locations around Europe", with customers including H&M, Zalando, Otto and Inditex, and that shoppers chose the reusable option in up to 40% of cases. Then: "However, large-scale adaptation was not reached." The report blames the pandemic, store closures and the supply-chain shock of the war in Ukraine.

The report also claims revenue grew threefold during the project. The filed accounts support that only up to 2020: revenue rose 242% to €660,000 in the financial year to August 2020, then held at €656,000 over a 16-month period to December 2021, before falling to €433,000 in 2022, the project's last year. Pilots with Zalando in the Nordics and H&M's Weekday brand across Europe began in autumn 2019, ArcticStartup reported at the time, and the report says RePack launched remotely in Canada and the US during the project, with Canada Post setting up a return channel. In its August 2019 application to MIT Solve, RePack described the US as still in a pilot phase and "looking for a Product-Market-Fit". The report names Levi's as an early user of a rental and subscription model. None of these pilots is documented as a lasting large contract.

1. New packaging, cleaning and return channelsDeliveredBuilt and tested in Europe, including in-store returns with Oysho and Tchibo, per CORDIS.
2. Big-brand customersPilotsH&M, Zalando, Otto and Inditex brands; the Oysho trial became a commercial deal, per CORDIS.
3. Scale-up to replace single-use packagingNot achieved"Large-scale adaptation was not reached," says the final report.
4. Growing revenuePeaked early€660k in 2019/20, €433k in 2022, €191k in 2023, per Asiakastieto.

The project ran on schedule to its planned end date, and the grant paid for real work: a tested return network and contracts with some of Europe's largest fashion retailers. What it did not produce was the scale-up it was named for.

The Money and the Team After the Grant

The accounts tell the rest of the story. Summaries of the filings published by Suomen Asiakastieto and Fonecta Finder agree on revenue to within €1,000 and on headcount. Staff peaked at 12 in the period to December 2021 and fell to 7, then 2, then none. The change rates Asiakastieto publishes imply that the periods ending December 2021 and June 2025 lasted 16 and 18 months.

The bottom line is harder to read. Finder gives net results of €24,000, minus €191,000, plus €394,000, minus €436,000 and minus €30,000 for the five periods. Asiakastieto reports an operating profit of €612,000 for the period to June 2025, the one in which the business was sold, against Finder's net loss of €30,000; neither summary explains the gap, and the full accounts are behind a paywall. What the record shows clearly is that, apart from the EU grant, no outside funding round for RePack was found: the company's growth was financed by a business that never earned more than €660,000 a year.

An Early EU Bet

The 2019 grant was not the first. In 2015 the company won €50,000 from the SME Instrument Phase 1 for a six-month feasibility study to pilot RePack outside Finland. Its report says that by October 2015 it had 15 web stores in Finland, about 500 daily deliveries, letters of intent from two global brands and a sales pipeline of over €2 million. In 2017 RePack won the Nordic Council Environment Prize. The reporting page of the 2019 project lists the German Design Award and German Sustainable Design Award as well.

Why Europe Should Care

RePack's market existed only if regulation created it, and the company said so. When the Commission proposed its packaging regulation with minimum reuse targets of 10% for e-commerce packaging by 2030 and 50% by 2040, Hellgren called it a possible "game changer" in the CORDIS article. The final Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2025/40, has been in force since 11 February 2025 and applies from 12 August 2026, according to the European Commission. RePack and Packaging Journal say the final text exempted mailers, bags and boxes from the take-back requirements RePack had counted on; RePack blames "the influence of lobby groups".

The case matters beyond one start-up. The EU's circular economy policy relies on reuse systems that are more expensive than throwaway packaging until scale or rules close the gap. RePack shows the EIC funding the system before the rules existed, and the business failing to wait for them.

The Verdict

RePack, Original RePack Oy and oceansix have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.