Experience: The Missing Link to Scaling the Circular Economy

Imagine a world in which manufactured products never end up in a landfill; instead, they continually circulate through an ecosystem of incentivized partners and stakeholders, being refurbished, recycled, returned, and resold. Clothing retailers collect gently used items to resell or rework into new pieces. Manufacturers repair and resell used TVs, laptops, or phones. White goods such as washing machines and refrigerators are built as modular assets that are simple to repair or upgrade; rather than being disposed of when they break down, they circulate through the economy via maintenance, reuse, remanufacturing, and material recovery.

Customers benefit from lower costs, while businesses capture value well beyond the point of sale, realize strong customer and partner loyalty, and experience high resource efficiency, all while protecting the planet.

Some of these circular activities exist on a limited scale in the real world, of course, but they are most often the result of regulatory mandates. The circular economy has rarely grown far beyond where corporate compliance, transparency, and risk mitigation efforts have taken it.

Yet as regulations have become clearer and their requirements more standardized, leading companies are seeing new possibilities in circularity. They are moving beyond the question of “How do we comply?” to “How do we create value—and scale it?”

To unlock the full potential of the circular economy, companies must go beyond designing circular systems that work in theory. They must create systems that businesses, partners, and people will actively choose in practice, allowing participation in circularity to scale across complex ecosystems. This means understanding how value is not only created and captured, but also perceived, experienced, and reinforced across the entire ecosystem.

Experience design is the missing link. Building on the CircX framework pioneered by Gerhard Seizer, Kearney’s TEAMS design business enables companies to translate circular ambition into intuitive, desirable, and scalable experiences. By applying UX principles to circular systems, we help design the incentives, interactions, and touchpoints that make participation valuable for every stakeholder.

Many companies have taken the first steps toward embedding circularity—the key to sustainable consumption and manufacturing—into their governance models, product requirements, and supply chains. They have primarily taken these actions in response to regulatory efforts, such as:

• Right to Repair, enacted across the EU and in several US states to allow consumers to repair their own products without penalty

• Extended Producer Responsibility, enacted in several US states to make producers responsible for end- of-life product management

• Ecodesign for Sustainable Products, a 2024 EU directive that ensures most products are durable, repairable, recyclable, and resource efficient. Importantly, it introduced the digital product passport, a unique identifier for every product that includes essential details such as origin, materials, environmental impact, user manual, and disposal recommendations. Companies that manufacture, import, or sell physical goods in Europe are subject to DPP mandates, as are non-EU companies exporting to the European market.

Circularity brings rewards

Whereas just three to five years ago, businesses were uncertain about the way regulations would play out, compliance is now becoming standardized practice. As a result, many businesses learned how to be compliant, with some even launching initial, small-scale pilots of circular products and systems. And today, many are ready to move beyond compliance to value generation, including the very real possibility of creating value through:

• Reduced raw material dependence and increased protection from supply shortages
• Recurring service revenues
• Increased resilience through diversified value networks

Customer loyalty and brand differentiation should also grow, as circularity allows consumers to enjoy fewer product breakdowns, lower lifetime costs, and less frequent product replacement, not to mention the greater societal benefits of lower emissions, reduced mining, less electronic waste, and more local repair jobs.

Finally, by keeping a close relationship with suppliers, customers, and other players as they track their products throughout the ecosystem, businesses will absorb a great deal of valuable information, such as product tracking, pricing, and performance data, a substantial source of future value.

This is where CircX comes in: by bringing experience design into all of the interactions across the product ecosystem, CircX can make circularity not only feasible, but desirable and scalable.

The implications for businesses are significant. “Circularity” is clearly not a feature that can simply be added to an existing product. In truth, genuine circularity requires re-engineering the entire system in which a product’s value is created and retained. It requires reverse logistics, refurbishment and repair networks, digital platforms, materials tracking, and new forms of collaboration across industry boundaries.

In this context, value creation must shift from linear supply chains to interconnected value networks. Manufacturers, service providers, logistics partners, refurbishers, repairers, packagers, recyclers, and customers must all become part of an interdependent system, whether they are interacting physically or digitally with the product, packaging, or service in question.

Note that in a linear economy, competitive advantage is often driven by product performance, cost efficiency, and brand positioning. In a circular economy, these factors remain important but are no longer sufficient. Circular systems depend on the coordinated behavior of multiple stakeholders—each with their own incentives, constraints, and expectations. As a result, competitive advantage increasingly depends on how effectively companies can design and manage interactions throughout their interconnected networks, particularly as the ecosystem expands. Even when the business model is theoretically sound, execution can fall short because stakeholders do not behave as expected or desired.

Navigating circular systems—and capturing value across multiple product life cycles—is therefore inherently complex, from attempting to track products after initial sale to providing the right incentives to customers and business partners. For all businesses, and particularly Fortune 500 companies (given their vast linear systems), the transition to circularity requires developing new capabilities, including cross- functional collaboration, ecosystem thinking, behavioral insights, and advanced design integration. It also demands closer alignment between strategy, operations, and the customer experience (see figure 1).

Designing an outstanding experience is the key

While traditional approaches to circularity prioritize technical feasibility, regulatory compliance, and economic efficiency—and these remain essential—they are not sufficient to drive adoption at scale. Circular systems only succeed when they align with human behavior (in other words, when they are intuitive, rewarding, and desirable). We therefore believe the key motivator for any stakeholder is not just the right strategy or technology, but a great experience, one that the user wants to have again and again. This experience will mark the difference between mediocrity and success.

If players are to willingly participate in the ecosystem, their experience must typically be driven by incentives. Beyond an inherent desire to do something good for the planet, what incentives would drive a customer to send used clothing in the mail back to a retailer, or a manufacturer to build a modular refrigerator?

At its core, our CircX approach builds on the experiences of both the businesses and the people in the ecosystem, designing incentives and generating engagement for both. On the business side, it also means designing revenue models, partnerships, and operating frameworks that allow circular flows to function at scale. This includes mechanisms such as life-cycle-based revenue streams, shared infrastructure, and collaborative efforts among industry players. And on the people side, it includes the way stakeholders perceive and interact with circular solutions, including usability, emotional engagement, and trust across all touchpoints—from product interaction to service interfaces and return processes.

There is some natural overlap between the CircX approach and our established Design for Sustainability: Circular Design Focus. Both approaches enable clients to regenerate ecosystems, extend product life, and preserve materials and value over time. However, while the key focus of our Design for Sustainability approach is on enhancing technical product design for circularity, CircX leads the way in optimizing interactions between stakeholders, including the design of circular systems and experiences, incentives, interactions, and touchpoints across an ecosystem.

When all players are on the same page, circular systems can achieve both economic viability and widespread adoption. Our CircX approach treats this alignment as a strategic design challenge.

CircX leverages experience patterns to drive behavior

To meet this challenge, we help companies understand the fundamental business and human needs that drive behavior within circular systems, and design for them. Using established UX principles, with their focus on usability, accessibility, and emotional engagement, we introduce a set of experience patterns specifically tailored to circular ecosystems (see figure 2).

Moving from compliance to competitive advantage

What began as a regulatory necessity is evolving into a strategic opportunity for growth and differentiation. By designing circular experiences that align business and human incentives, organizations can transform circularity from an obligation into a source of competitive advantage, creating and scaling value generation.

Our CircX approach provides a framework for achieving this transformation, integrating ecosystem design, business strategy, and people-centered experiences into a coherent approach. For companies willing to lead, the opportunity is clear—not just to participate in the circular economy, but to shape it and, ultimately, participate in its success.