Repairability scoring at DECATHLON

At DECATHLON, the path to repairability scoring started in 2020. Why? How? What methodology? Explanations

In France, regulations evolved in 2021, with it now being mandatory to give certain products a repairability score.The aim: force electronic product manufacturers to make their products more repairable and encourage the purchase of these products.
Even though these legal obligations did not apply to DECATHLON, it sensed an opportunity. Why not take inspiration from the ADEME (French Governmental Agency) methodology to quantify its own products' repairability?

How can you ensure you are making improvements? By quantifying. As for other topics, to work on repairability, you first have to assess, count, structure data, and identify “sticking points”...
Repairability subsequently contributes to the strategy, which is more all-encompassing, of rolling out eco-design.

The first step: identify a product's principal faults

In other words, how do you know what is likely to get damaged on a product?

This is a crucial stage: the rest of the methodology stems from this. Subsequently, people in charge of collecting the available data have to carefully work out from the data to understand (and quantify) what are a product's principal faults.

What this means in practice is that a network of specialists, within DECATHLON, is responsible for analysing these faults, by product type.
Those who want to become a specialist must take a 2-hour course to understand the methodology to analyse faults.

What are the sources of information for analysing faults?

- Customer returns: when a customer returns the product, DECATHLON identifies the reason for the returnIt is the biggest source of information.
- Some of these returns are sent to the design teams for more detailed analysis.
- Customer surveys are conducted for certain types of products: more in-depth analysis to understand how the products last after the warranty period, find out more about the faulty products not necessarily brought back to the store…
- It is also possible, for some types of products, to rely on the spare parts sold.

Please note: The action plans conducted in parallel to improve a product's durability can also influence this analysis.
The data are reviewed every two years depending on how the product faults evolve.

Here is an example of the defects collected on a tent ➡️

Step 2: Product assessment / Objective: know which faults have a complete repair solution.

What is a complete solution?
At DECATHLON, what is understood by the notion of “complete” repair is one based on 4 criteria:
- disassembly
- availability of spare parts
- repair price
- documentation

There are sub-criteria for each of these criteria. For example, within “disassembly”, you find: average product disassembly time, the tools required and the type of fix (stitch or patch, for example).
These are the same criteria as those put in place by the ADEME for the French repairability index.

If we take the example of the tent, being able to repair it thanks to stitching or applying a patch to the tent's flysheet will have a more positive environmental impact (by avoiding completely replacing the flysheet).

How is the data collected translated?

Each fault detected during diagnosis is assigned a fault percentage.
If a fault has a complete repair solution (available parts, disassembled product, price ok and documentation ok), it subsequently “earns” the associated fault percentage.
Even if there is just one “NOK”, the product “loses” the related percentage.

This is what lets us calculate the damage and failure coverage percentage.
In the example imagined above, the tent “loses” 31% of damage and failure because the repair price is greater than 30% of the new product's price.

For the score out of 10, the points weighting system is similar to the one established by the ADEME.

What products are concerned by repairability scoring?

In 2024, DECATHLON currently voluntarily adopts this initiative. At the end of 2023, a little less than 3 % of products score higher than 80 % in terms of faults covered.
Our objective for 2030 is to achieve 25 %. DECATHLON targets products for which repair is a big challenge (scooters, inline skates, tents, bags, weight training equipment, ski jackets, basketball hoops, trampolines, walking poles, watches…).
For other products, the issue will lie more with durability and/or recyclable (socks, tyres, bike helmets…) In terms of the split, “first layer” clothing (in contact with the body) is on the durability side of things, whereas PPE (personal protective equipment), such as bike helmets, benefit mainly from initiatives linked to recyclable.

In 2023, the in-house repairability scoring methodology was audited by the French voluntary organisation HOP (Stop Planned Obsolescence) and the auditing firm Auxilia to guarantee the method's suitability, along with continuing to improve it. This approval encourages us to pursue this approach and speed up the rollout of new products while continuing to enhance our assessment system.

To go further

What is a durable product?

Spoiler: if your big toe pokes a hole through your sock or your tyre punctures within the first few kilometres, they are not durable products.

The concept of repairability

Or how to encourage a longer life for our products.

Designing our products to reduce their environmental impact

Our ecodesign approach integrates environmental considerations into product development, with the aim of reducing the impact throughout their life cycle. It serves as a playbook for our design team to develop performance-driven, sustainability-focused solutions.

Avoided emissions standard: What is it?

Offsets, low-carbon strategy… or even avoided emissions. The standards are becoming widespread but are not always obvious to understand…