Why We Need to Scale Back: PPWR

We love cycling. We love making stuff that lasts. And we love the idea of being able to sell our products to riders across Europe without too many hoops to jump through.

Turns out, the last part has become a little more complicated than we hoped.

After looking into the costs and admin work involved in packaging compliance across the EU, we’ve decided to limit our direct-to-consumer shipping to Germany and Sweden for the time being.

Not exactly the grand European expansion story we had in mind. But we’ve crunched the numbers, looked at the workload, and decided that focusing on fewer markets makes more sense for us right now.

Here’s what we learned along the way.

Let’s start with the alphabet soup...

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a principle that makes businesses responsible for the packaging they put on the market, including its collection and recycling. Depending on the country and your role in the supply chain, this can mean registering with local authorities or compliance schemes, reporting packaging volumes, and paying fees towards recycling.

For an e-commerce business, the cardboard box, paper, and other packaging used to ship your products can all be part of the equation.

The EU has been working towards a more harmonised approach to packaging through the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR). The idea is to reduce packaging waste, improve recyclability, and make the rules more consistent across member states.

All good things, if you ask us! We’re big fans of sustainability in several of its meanings: making products last longer, reusing stuff, and thinking about what happens to it when we’re done with it.

The catch? Shared environmental goals don’t automatically mean one shared administrative process. 

Depending on the country, businesses can still face different registration systems, reporting requirements, fees, and local arrangements. Selling a product across borders can therefore mean dealing with several separate compliance processes.

And that’s where things get interesting. Or, depending on your appetite for paperwork, not particularly interesting at all.

We started looking into what it would take to stay registered and compliant across the European markets we serve today.

Some of the multi-country service offers we received averaged around €590 per country in base service fees alone. That’s before adding potential costs for authorised representatives, local fees, and packaging recycling contributions.

The exact costs depend on the country, the service provider, and how much packaging you put on the market. Still, the quotes gave us a pretty good idea of what we were looking at.

Now, if you’re selling substantial volumes in a country, the idea of taking responsibility and the associated costs seems perfectly reasonable. But what if you’re shipping a handful of orders to a smaller market?

We compared the estimated compliance costs with our actual sales figures. In several countries, the numbers simply didn’t make much sense. The fixed costs would likely eat up a significant share of the revenue we’d generate there.

We want to make good products, make these accessible to as many riders as possible and keep improving what we do. Spending hundreds of euros a year on the admin side of markets that don’t generate enough sales to cover those costs isn’t exactly helping us get there.

This is not about avoiding our responsibilities! We understand Grepp as a responsible business. If we want to sell in a market, we need to comply with its regulations.

It’s about making sensible decisions about where we can operate in the first place. And for now – for direct sales to our riders – these markets are Germany and Sweden.

Germany is our strongest market, so continuing to serve it directly was an easy decision. We also decided to keep our registration in Sweden, as this is our home market.

Focusing on these two markets means fewer registrations to maintain, fewer reporting processes to manage, and less time spent figuring out which portal wants which information this time around.

Also, we’re a small team. We don’t have a dedicated department whose sole purpose is to keep up with packaging registries across Europe. Every hour spent on this admin work is an hour we can’t spend working on products, supporting our retail partners, or doing the other things that keep GREPP rolling.

And with packaging regulations continuing to evolve, we’d rather keep things manageable than spread ourselves too thin.

So, for now, Germany and Sweden it is for you who want to buy directly from us.

We get why packaging needs to be regulated! Packaging waste is a real issue, and businesses should take responsibility for the materials they put into circulation. When sourcing materials, both for the grippers and their packaging, this is a major focus of ours.

But there’s a difference between having a sensible environmental objective and making it straightforward for small-sized businesses to comply.

For a small business selling across several EU countries, the current experience can involve separate national portals, different reporting procedures, local service providers, and a fair amount of detective work.

We’d love to see a more joined-up approach. A centralised digital portal, common reporting standards, and clearer guidance for cross-border sellers would be a good start.

The environmental requirements should not appear. They are crucial in today’s world.

The admin just needs to become easier to manage.

After all, the less time small businesses spend navigating paperwork, the more time we can spend building products, serving customers, and contributing to the things these regulations are meant to support.

We’re not expecting everything to become simple overnight. But a more coordinated system would make it easier for smaller businesses to do the right thing across borders.

Here’s the thing. Limiting our direct online shipping doesn’t mean we’re stepping away from riders in other countries! We would not let our community down like that!

It’s quite the opposite.

We’re a rider-owned company, and local bike shops have always been a big part of what GREPP is about. They’re the people helping riders find the right setup, fixing things when they go wrong, sharing knowledge, and keeping local cycling communities alive.

We want to keep supporting great bike shops and growing our network of independent retailers.

And honestly, there’s something pretty great about walking into a bike shop, chatting about your setup, getting advice from someone who knows their stuff, and leaving with exactly what you need.

Our online shop has its place, but it isn’t the whole story. We’d rather build strong relationships with great bike shops than chase online sales in every corner of Europe and the world, just for the sake of it.

So if you’re outside Germany and Sweden, have a look at our bike shop finder. You might find a GREPP-friendly shop closer than you think.

And if you run a bike shop and want to work with us, we’d love to hear from you!

For now, our direct-to-consumer shop ships to Germany and Sweden only. Our B2B shop remains open to bike shops internationally.

We’ll keep an eye on how the packaging rules develop and review our approach as things change. If registration becomes simpler and the numbers start making sense in more markets, we’ll have another look.

Until then, we’ll focus on doing what we do best: making reusable handlebar tape, working with good partners, and supporting the local bike shop culture we’re proud to be part of.

Thanks for riding with us, supporting your favourite bike shop, and sticking around while we figure things out.

Ride, reuse, recycle. And support your local bike shop.

Enjoy riding.

Your GREPP team!