We made the decision to pause our refill scheme last year. The original setup was no longer sustainable for us operationally. We were moving warehouses, and the way the scheme was built simply couldn’t scale with the business or work globally.  We were dealing with lost parcels, loads of broken glass, and unclean jars with hairs etc every day - despite all our efforts including several hires to focus exclusively on refills, we just couldn’t keep it going as fast as it was growing. Pausing it wasn’t taken lightly, but it was necessary.

Since then, our focus has been on finding a refill solution that can scale - one that works not just in one country or one warehouse, but globally - and that genuinely aligns with our values.

The biggest challenge we’re facing is packaging.

Over the past year, we’ve tested seven different refill sachet materials. Our priority has always been plastic-free packaging, ideally compostable or biodegradable. Unfortunately, what we’ve found is that many of these materials just don’t work technically for skincare.

The core issue is barrier protection. The packaging needs to stop air and moisture from escaping. With the compostable and biodegradable materials we’ve tested, water vapour slowly escapes from the sachet - even just sitting at room temperature. We’ve run official accelerated stability tests at high temperatures, and in many cases, these materials fail within a week due to weight and water loss. That makes them completely unsuitable for real-world shipping and storage.

That’s why this has taken time. Each material we test takes months, and so far all have failed.

Right now, the most promising option we’re testing is a plastic-free material made primarily from cellulose, with a thin aluminum layer to provide the barrier protection that compostable films can’t yet achieve. It isn’t a perfect solution - it’s not fully compostable or recyclable - but importantly, it is free from plastic polymers. That’s a big step forward.

Alongside this, we’re also testing other compostable, paper-based materials, and we’re working with a specialist R&D company. We’ve invested over $20,000 in a bespoke development project to try to create a solution specifically for our products. There’s no guarantee it will work - but we’re doing it because no ready-made solution currently exists.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us still working on this - constantly. Circular, refillable packaging remains an absolute top priority for UpCircle. We are investing significant time, money, and resources into finding a solution that actually works, can scale globally, and lives up to our sustainability values.

While we continue our efforts I want to remind you that we are still are working with refill shops. On our website we have a stockist locator map and you can filter it to see your nearest that stocks UpCircle as refills. We have in store & delivery options with over 130 refill partners in the UK & more in the US + EU also.

I know this isn’t the quick answer you may want, but I wanted to be fully transparent about the reality and the effort happening behind the scenes. We’ll keep testing, we’ll keep pushing suppliers and technology, and we’ll keep you updated as soon as we have meaningful progress to share.

Thank you for holding us to a high standard - and for caring as much about this as we do. If you’ve got any questions please pop us an email and we’ll get back to you.