Join Decathlon for an interactive, hands-on workshop exploring how circularity works in practice, and how it can make business sense. Using its Buy Back programme as a real-life case, you’ll tackle consumer, operational and business challenges and learn how to turn circular ambitions into action.
Circularity in Action: Learn with Decathlon
The challenge
Circularity sounds compelling in theory. Making it work in practice and making the numbers work is much harder.
Will customers actually participate? Can a circular model create new revenue opportunities, reduce waste or strengthen customer loyalty? How do you make it operationally feasible without adding unnecessary cost or complexity? And perhaps most importantly: how do you know whether an idea makes commercial sense before investing significant time and resources into it?
In this interactive workshop, Decathlon invites you behind the scenes of its circular journey to explore these questions through the lens of its Buy Back programme.
Whether you work for a large organisation or are running a growing SME, the session is designed around a practical question: how can circularity move from a sustainability ambition to something that creates tangible value for the business and its customers?
The workshop
Rather than simply hearing about Decathlon’s approach, you’ll get to work on the challenge yourself.
Following an introduction to Decathlon’s Buy Back programme, participants will work in small teams through three practical rounds, each tackling a different piece of the circularity puzzle:
1. The Consumer
What motivates customers to participate in a circular model? What holds them back? Explore the barriers and incentives that can make or break adoption. Explore the barriers and incentives that can make or break adoption — and how circular propositions can create additional value and engagement for customers.
2. The Operations
A great circular idea still needs to work in practice. What needs to happen behind the scenes to make the model operationally viable and scalable? Explore where costs, complexity and operational barriers arise, and what needs to be true for the model to work commercially.
3. The Business Experiment
Before investing heavily in a new idea, how can you test whether it actually works? How do you turn the idea into a business case and test whether it actually works? Develop a practical experiment to validate customer demand, operational feasibility and the potential business case — helping you move from assumption to evidence.
Each round combines insights from the Decathlon & Innoboost team with a hands-on breakout exercise, giving you the opportunity to apply the thinking to your own organisation or industry.
The session concludes by bringing the different pieces together and exploring how the lessons can be translated into action beyond Decathlon — including for SMEs that may not have the resources of a large multinational, but still want to identify practical, commercially viable opportunities within circularity.
Why attend?
For professionals and leaders working on sustainability, innovation, operations, strategy or business development — and anyone looking to turn circular ambitions into practical action. as well as SME owners and entrepreneurs interested in how circular business models can create customer value, reduce waste, unlock new opportunities and ultimately make commercial sense.
You do not need to be a sustainability expert. If you are interested in how to test new business ideas, understand what customers value and build commercially viable models without committing significant resources upfront, this workshop is equally relevant to you.
What you will take away
– A practical understanding of how a circular Buy Back model works
– Insight into the consumer, operational and commercial considerations behind circular business models
– A better understanding of where circularity can create business value — and where it may not
– A framework provided by Innoboost for identifying barriers and opportunities within your own organisation
– Practical ideas for testing circular concepts through business experiments
– Inspiration from Decathlon’s own experience of putting circularity into practice
Come ready to participate, challenge assumptions and explore what it really takes to make circularity work — both environmentally and commercially.
And yes, this remains a women-only event – designed to create the right space for connection, conversation and community across chambers.
Come for the conversations, stay for the setting – and take the opportunity to discover more of Raffles Sentosa’s beautiful premises.
