Vision of sustainability: Transa as a circular company

Your clothing and equipment have to put up with a great deal, depending on the adventure you go on. Consequently, it’s important to care for them the right way. Even high-quality products need maintenance so you can extend their service life – and well-cared-for products are sustainable products, because they last for a long time. If you look after your functional clothing or equipment, such as your sleeping bag, properly, you also save resources. This is a rather tricky task for some materials, but we’d be happy to help.

Damage to your tent, a broken zip on your sleeping bag or a burn hole in your jacket doesn’t mean the end of the line for your piece of kit. Our professionals in the Transa repair workshop will find a great solution for almost any kind of damage.

Transa has been repairing outdoor equipment in Switzerland for over 40 years. In 2023, we received a total of 21,778 repairs, which is 18.5% more than the previous year. We handled more than half of this internally, for example at our state-of-the-art repair workshop in Altstetten. However, we don’t just want to do the repairs, we also want to make this service more visible. We strongly believe that we should continue to promote craftsmanship in Switzerland and anchor the idea of repairing things more culturally in the product life cycle.

Pop by with your favourite items to our stores – even if you didn’t buy them from us – have them repaired and you’ll be able to use them for longer – and, in turn, more sustainably.

Is your equipment and clothing still in fantastic condition, despite having been on a good few adventures? If so, pass your adventure on to the next person by selling your kit on our second-hand platform. Transa.ch/secondhand is a unique second-hand platform with a focus on outdoor and travel equipment. It’s more sustainable than buying new and it’s cheaper, too.

The longer you wear clothes and use your equipment, the less new products need to be produced and the more CO₂ is saved. This is particularly important for high-quality, expensive outdoor products. We therefore believe that we, as a retailer, have an obligation to help shape and create access to second-hand markets.

Want to try a new outdoor sport – but don’t want to buy all the equipment yet? See how you get on with it to start with and hire the items you need. Our branches have equipment for climbing, camping, bikepacking and spending the night outdoors.

The circular economy also has a lot to do with questioning consumer behaviour. Do we have to own things or can we share and borrow them? Our equipment hire service is also intended to encourage people to question their own consumption and to create easy access to high-quality outdoor products without having to own them yourself. It also means you don’t have to buy things you rarely need.

Discarded outdoor products, like backpacks, tents or paragliders, are turned into pencil cases, purses, shoe bags and much more. We work with Cyclodos to manufacture these items, and they’ve available to buy from us online and in our stores. Each product is unique and sustainably creates something new out of an item that might have otherwise been thrown away.