E-commerce has exploded during the pandemic. According to Statistics Norway, 9 out of 10 Norwegians shopped online during last year.
When you shop online, there are separate rights around the right of withdrawal, and the clothing industry in many cases gives you even better terms. With an offer of free returns and 100 days of open purchase, the giant Zalando is the most popular clothing store online among Norwegians.
Zalando has over 40 million customers, spread across 23 countries.
They themselves state that 50 percent of all purchases are returned, but what really happens with all that return? TV 2 helps you have tracked shipments of clothes to find out what happens to the clothes you send back.
See the whole case “The long journey of clothing” on Play now!
Two price ranges
We order seven garments from Zalando, two jackets, two jumpsuits, two t-shirts and a pack of socks. The clothes are in two different price ranges to see if price makes any difference in where the garments end up.
– TRACKER: The chip allows us to follow the journey to the return. Photo: TV 2 helps you
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We place trackers in our clothes so that we can follow them on the journey ahead.
The packages are sent in individual shipments, and we will follow the updates over the next six months.
Watch the sensational journey to one of the garments in the video above.
These garments were returned:
- Women’s T-shirt: 50, –
- Men’s T-shirt: 69, –
- Socks: 149, –
- Jumpsuit green: 279, –
- Jumpsuit black: 329, –
- Green jacket: 319, –
- Pink jacket: 399, –
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Common destination
All packages end up first at PostNord’s terminal at Langhus, at about the same time. From here, all packages go to Zalando’s intermediate warehouse outside Stockholm, but at different times.
From there we see two different routes. The cheapest garments are sent to a warehouse in northwestern Poland, while the more expensive clothes go to Zalando’s main warehouse in Erfurt, Germany.
Sharon Cullinane is a professor of sustainable logistics, and is one of the world’s foremost experts on returns. She says that our findings are not unusual.
– Many customers expect that what they return will be resold immediately, but most companies send all the clothes to Poland or Estonia to be processed and repackaged there.
See answers from Zalando further down.
Lots of returns
In recent years, Cullinane has researched return and how consumers and companies relate to it. The amount of returns is shocking.
– Return of clothes has the absolute highest average, but it varies a lot depending on the type of garment it is. For long dresses, the return rate is 90 percent, it is completely insane, she says.
– CAN SUBJECT: Sharon Cullinane has been researching returns for several years. Photo: TV 2 helps you
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90 percent of all long dresses that are bought online are thus sent back.
She goes on to say that this has only gotten worse as consumers have become more confident in online shopping.
– Customers have learned that they can buy four varieties of the same garment, try them on at home and maybe keep one or two, and then send the rest back, and that has no consequences.
Sold on
The clothes that travel to Germany we see are sold again and travel to new owners. The green jumpsuit goes straight to Switzerland where it is still located.
The black jumpsuit travels around Germany a bit and seems to have ended up in a sports shop.
The pink jacket gets a slightly longer journey, but eventually arrives at a customer in Berlin.
The longest journey
After a few months of updates on the clothes, we see one garment that has traveled considerably further than the others – the green jacket.
It was thus first sent back from Norway, to the warehouse in Sweden, to the main warehouse in Germany, then to a customer in Finland, and then returned to Germany. The jacket was then bought by someone in the north of Spain, then sent to a warehouse in Barcelona, returned to Germany again and finally sold to someone in the Czech Republic.
In total, the jacket has traveled an incredible 10,512 km – a distance equivalent to a drive Oslo-Jerusalem and back again.
Leader of the Future in our hands, Anja Bakken Riise, is shocked by this one return journey.
– SURPRISED: Anja Bakken Riise is well acquainted with the problems surrounding clothing, but was surprised by the findings. Photo: TV 2 helps you
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– It sounds completely insane, I get completely dumb. In a traditional life cycle for clothing, it is the production phase and the use phase that have the largest climate emissions, while transport is a very small part of the calculation, but I have not seen those calculations done with such a journey, says Riise.
In total, our return of seven garments has traveled a full 26,242 km.
– LONG JOURNEY: The clothes had a journey similar to the North Cape – South Africa and back again. Photo: TV 2 helps you
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New life for the cheap clothes
The three cheap garments that traveled to Poland apparently remained in stock until the trackers stopped working. TV 2 helps you have asked Zalando to visit this warehouse to see what happens to the clothes there, but Zalando says it is not possible due to strict corona rules.
However, they write that these clothes have also been resold and that the trackers may have been found in the quality control.
Do not want an interview
TV 2 helps you have several times asked Zalando for an interview, but they do not want to ask. The company responds to this by e-mail:
Zalando Danmark
In our return process, all goods undergo a standard quality control. The vast majority of our customers return goods in perfect condition, and around 97 percent of returned goods can be resold on Zalando.
Products that can no longer be sold through the Zalando store, such as items from previous seasons or items that are only left in a few sizes, are sold through the Zalando Lounge and our Zalando Outlet stores.
Goods are often moved between warehouses for capacity reasons or to optimize the possibility of resale. While some inventories cover a specific region, for example, the warehouse in Poland covers several regions. By moving goods here, it is more likely that they will be resold and eventually used.
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