Every company working on fit sells the same environmental story. Returns are wasteful. We reduce returns. Therefore we reduce waste.
The story is true. It is also the small story, and telling it well has kept the industry from noticing the large one.
What a return actually costs
As part of a Vinnova-funded programme on reducing the climate footprint of e-commerce, we modelled the emissions of a footwear return in Sweden — every transport leg, using Swedish national transport emission factors and travel survey data for the customer's own journey.
A returned pair of shoes costs somewhere between 0.33 and 0.47 kg CO₂e, depending on how it travels.
That is a real number and it is a small number. It is roughly a two-kilometre drive. Multiply it across a market and it becomes significant — Swedish online footwear alone generates well over a million unnecessary return journeys a year — but per transaction, it is modest.
The leg nobody counts
The breakdown contained something we did not expect.
Home delivery returns are the cheapest in emissions terms, at roughly 0.33 kg. The parcel is collected on a route the van was driving anyway; the marginal cost of one more stop is small.
Click and collect returns are the most expensive, at roughly 0.47 kg — around forty percent higher.
The reason is the customer. A store or pickup-point return requires somebody to travel there, and in Sweden that journey is often made by car over several kilometres. That single leg outweighs the entire logistics chain behind it.
The most visible part of a return — the parcel moving through the network — is not the part that dominates the emissions. The invisible part is: a person driving.
This matters because retailers optimise what they can see. Click and collect is cheaper for the retailer and is often promoted as the greener option. In return flows, on these numbers, it is the opposite.
Now zoom out
Set the return aside and look at the shoe itself.
Published lifecycle assessments of footwear manufacturing — the MIT work on running shoes is the most cited — put a single pair somewhere in the region of ten to fifteen kilograms of CO₂e. Most of it comes from materials and production, not from shipping. A shoe is a small, complex object made of many bonded materials in an energy-intensive process, and it arrives at the customer already carrying most of its lifetime footprint.
Compare the two figures honestly.
Preventing one return saves under half a kilo. Preventing the manufacture of one pair of shoes saves twenty to thirty times as much.
Which means every return-reduction argument in this industry, ours included, has been optimising the smaller of two levers by a full order of magnitude.
Where the large lever actually is
If the shoe is the footprint, then the environmental question is not how efficiently we move shoes around. It is how many shoes get made, and how long each one stays in use.
And that reframes what fit is for.
A shoe that fits badly does not only generate a return. Quite often it generates no return at all — it is kept, worn twice, and abandoned at the back of a cupboard because it hurts. No logistics system ever records that event. It appears in no returns dashboard. It is a completed sale and a satisfied metric.
It is also a full pair of shoes' worth of carbon, spent on nothing.
The same logic runs through the whole chain. Shoes that are replaced early because they never suited the foot. Shoes bought in duplicate because the customer ordered two sizes and kept the wrong one rather than face another return. Product lines designed around a last that fits fewer people than the designer assumed, producing a predictable stream of unwearable inventory.
None of that is a transport problem. All of it is a fit problem.
What we cannot yet claim
Three honest limits, because a sustainability argument without them is marketing.
We can measure the small lever and only estimate the large one. Avoided returns are countable — the parcel either moves or it does not. Avoided manufacture is not. It requires knowing how long a well-fitting shoe stays in service compared to a poorly fitting one, and that is a longitudinal question nobody in this industry has answered properly. We believe the effect is large. We cannot yet size it.
Better fit could increase consumption. If shopping for shoes online becomes reliable, people may simply buy more of them. This is the rebound effect and it is well documented in efficiency improvements generally. A fit layer that raises conversion while raising volume is not obviously a climate win, and anyone claiming otherwise should be asked for their reasoning.
Not every return is a loss. A substantial share of returned footwear is resold. The emissions of the journey are spent, but the shoe's embodied carbon is not. Treating every return as a destroyed pair overstates the case, and the industry does this routinely.
We would rather state the smaller claim accurately than the larger one loosely.
The version we believe
Reducing returns is worth doing. It saves real emissions, it saves real money, and it is measurable today, which is why it is what gets sold.
But it is the visible waste, not the large waste. The large waste is shoes that should never have been made, or that were made well and then discarded early because they met the wrong foot.
You do not solve that with faster logistics or better packaging. You solve it upstream, by knowing — before anything is shipped, and eventually before anything is manufactured — whether a given shoe suits a given person.
The most sustainable shoe is the one you keep wearing.
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