Exploratory multiple case study on successful upcycling businesses: ChopValue, Freitag and Pentatonic

Upcycling has become an important concept and practice in creative industries for artists, craftspeople, designers and makers as evidenced by increasing number of practitioners and businesses in the UK and beyond, especially under the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Despite the potential, many upcycling businesses are often craft-oriented and small-scale with financial struggles, which calls for scaling-up in order to overcome such liabilities. This paper provides multiple exploratory case studies with successful upcycling businesses to shed light on how small, craft-oriented upcycling businesses could be scaled up to have bigger impact on the environment and society while being financially viable. Three successful upcycling businesses were selected: (i) ChopValue in Canada; (ii) Freitag in Switzerland; and (iii) Pentatonic in the UK. Online contents (official websites, news and magazines, and other media information) were qualitatively analysed using grounded thematic analysis. The results revealed five common themes as success factors across the three case studies: (i) sustainability values or philosophy at the centre of the business; (ii) product and service offers competitive on the market; (iii) partnerships/collaborations for business effectiveness; (iv) innovation in production for competitive edge; and (v) sustainable/circular supply chain management