Award of Merit:

Returnr / Cumulo Group for Returnr Marketplace

Cumulo Group's in-house design team is committed to employing design to create positive environmental outcomes through user behaviour change and circular economy business models. Cumulo Group invests heavily in design to drive sustainable changes within our local and global community. 

Cumulo Group's primary brand, Returnr, has the mission to eliminate single-use food packaging waste through the deployment of durable, reusable packaging solutions. To achieve this goal Returnr has to work hard to design and develop a comprehensive range of innovative and patented container designs that (1) offer enhanced functionality to their single-use counterparts, (2) provide superior performance to normal reusable containers in high volume shared use, take-away and transit scenarios, and (3) can be manufactured and distributed at price points and with business models that are structured to reduce the financial barriers to the adoption of reusable packaging options. 

Cumulo Group has been awarded multiple Australian and International Design Awards for sustainable product and service designs under the brands of BeetBox, Dittoki and Returnr. In addition to in-house design for our own brands, Cumulo Group is currently working with several large corporate clients to develop innovative design solutions to reduce waste and environmental outcomes in food and beverage businesses. 

Especially through our Returnr brand we have developed our own unique human centered Minimum Viable Product (MVP) design model. The Returnr brand has in the past few years launched several innovative product-as-a-service business models in different sectors. These models call for the user centred testing of business models, prior to iteratively refining product and service designs with real world user feedback. This has ultimately lead to a unique and lean MVP product development approach that priorities pragmatic, lower cost and fast product development to implement usable (and yet unique) product solutions faster. 

In the last 12 months Cumulo Group has developed an in-house mentoring and professional development programme to assist in developing our young design team in both professional skills and broader professional maturity.

About the Project

The initial concept for Returnr Marketplace was born during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. With an existing business centred on revenues from Melbourne based takeaway cafe business, we were in desperate need to pivot and find new ways to eliminate single-use packaging waste. 

Returnr Marketplace is a circular economy business. Delivering groceries and alcohol products to Melbourne homes in reusable packaging. The business calls for collecting of empty containers from homes, washing, packing of food products & tracking of containers. 

The early months of design development focused almost entirely on the development of the business model and business strategy with keen focus on the approach to logistics (including return logistics), distribution/reach, and on the pricing approach and path to profitability. Due to our vast prior experience (with Returnr) in designing and developing products and systems for shared reusable containers in food and beverage contexts the early challenges to grapple with were not container design, functionality and material choice. But rather the initial challenges were in determining whether a viable grocery delivery business could be developed (and scaled) that employed reusable packaging, return logistics and container washing/reuse - all while being attractive and affordable to end users and a pro table business. 

Once we had developed our business model and strategy we quickly realised that we needed a relatively broad grocery product offering to make the MVP business viable. Affording us, (1) larger impact in reducing waste, (2) a sustainable average order value (helping profitably cover logistics costs), (3) ability to attract more customers who would order more often. 

Our focus then turned to designing a broad range of innovative containers that would support the grocery product offering, sourcing suppliers who were happy to work with us to supply zero waste goods in bulk packing (or packaging directly in our containers), and in developing the website, database and subscription infrastructure that would support the online based offering. 

We chose to develop and own in-house the; container design, return logistics, container washing, and IT infrastructure as they were core elements of the circular economy business that we either had strong existing ability in, or were highly confidential and critical to the success of the offering. Our product design process includes a lot of iterative product CAD modelling, in-house prototyping and product performance and user based testing. The fast iterative nature of our design process allows us to gather user-centred feedback and move quickly before investing heavily in tooling and production of container products. 

Our container product range in centred on the use of stainless steel and glass as the primary materials for their excellent hygienic performance in shared used and ability to be washed thousands of times without degradation of material.

Category: Use

Designers and Project Team:
Jamie Forsyth - Managing Director
Brett Capron - Design Director
Ethan Faifer - Product Design Engineer
Nhu Duong - Industrial Designer
Isabella Cutri - Industrial Designer