Circular economy · Marketplace
Refill Express.
A zero-waste shopping and delivery marketplace I co-founded in London. We helped local refill shops sell online and handled the collection, refilling, and return of customers’ reusable containers.
- Period
- 2021 – 2023
- My role
- Co-founder
- Status
- Concluded
- Multi-journey orders
- 500+
- Local refill store network
- London
- Venture period
- 2021–23
The idea
Make refilling as convenient as delivery.
Refill shopping reduces single-use packaging, but it also asks customers to plan a trip, carry containers, and find the right shop. Refill Express grew from my own frustration with that trade-off.
We brought local refill shops online and organised the journeys around each order, so customers could reuse their containers without making the trip themselves.
What I built
The marketplace and the operation behind it.
I designed the marketplace experience and built the consumer web/app, seller dashboard, container-tracking system, and payment integrations. The software had to account for both the products being sold and the containers moving between people.
Customer experience
Local store catalogues, product selection, and checkout with a choice of reusable containers or store-provided packaging.
Store operations
Seller tools and onboarding to bring London refill shops into the marketplace.
Container logistics
Container photos and capacity linked to each refill, alongside tracking and payments for collection and return journeys.
The details
Every refill had to find the right container.
Buying loose products online meant designing around the containers as well as the shopping basket. Customers could reuse a saved container or add one with a photo and its capacity, then choose what to fill it with.
The photo helped the store match each container to the right product. Capacity determined how much it could hold, with a refund for any quantity that would not fit. Those small details connected the checkout experience to the work happening in the shop.
In practice
A real service, run order by order.
We onboarded multiple London stores and fulfilled more than 500 multi-journey orders. Alongside product and engineering, I worked on operations, fundraising, and commercial partnerships.
Running the service made the dependencies clear: stock, container identification, store readiness, and delivery timing all had to work together.
The outcome
Convenience depends on the economics.
The mission resonated, but a clear path to healthy margins did not emerge. Two journeys per order and the work of onboarding stores made scaling slower and more expensive than expected.
We concluded the venture in 2023. It taught me how closely product design, customer convenience, and operational economics are connected in a physical marketplace.