Right to Repair Is Your Next Competitive Advantage
Your legal team has probably flagged right-to-repair legislation as a compliance risk. Your operations team has run the numbers on spare parts availability and come back with a cost figure. Your product team is worried about IP leakage.
They are all looking at the wrong side of the ledger.
The manufacturers who treat right-to-repair as a burden will spend the next five years building the minimum viable compliance stack at maximum cost. The manufacturers who treat it as an opportunity will use the same regulatory pressure to build something their competitors cannot easily replicate: a direct, persistent relationship with every customer who ever owned one of their products.
This article makes the case for the second path.
What the Regulations Actually Require
The UK's Ecodesign and Energy Labelling regulations were the opening move. They require manufacturers of certain white goods and electronic displays to make spare parts available for a defined period after a product is last placed on the market, and to supply repair information to professional repairers within a set window after a request. The exact obligations vary by product category, so check the specific schedule that applies to your products.
The EU's Right to Repair Directive (2024/1799), which member states must transpose into national law, goes considerably further. It widens the situations in which manufacturers must offer repair and introduces obligations including:
- Spare parts availability obligations, requiring manufacturers to supply parts at reasonable prices to both professional repairers and consumers for a defined period
- Repair information access, so that technical documentation, software tools, and diagnostic data are available to independent repairers, not just authorised networks
- Restrictions on practices that obstruct repair, such as preventing non-OEM parts from functioning or triggering false error codes
- A voluntary European Repair Information Form and an EU online platform to help consumers find repairers, so a repair is easier to choose over a replacement
Point-of-sale repairability labelling sits in separate instruments, not in 2024/1799. The Empowering Consumers Directive (2024/825) requires traders to display a reparability score where one has been established under harmonised EU rules, and the ESPR (below) provides for future repairability scoring by category through delegated acts. So the label is coming, but through a different legal route than the repair-duty directive, and the trader display obligation depends on those Union-level scoring rules being set rather than on a manufacturer choosing to publish a score of its own.
The Digital Product Passport (DPP) framework, rolling out under the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), treats repairability as a first-class data field for regulated categories. A product's repairability information, spare parts availability, and repair documentation links are the kind of data the DPP is designed to carry. If you are building DPP infrastructure, you are already building repair infrastructure. The question is whether that infrastructure creates customer value or just sits in a compliance database no one reads. (For a full breakdown of DPP obligations, see our guide to right to repair for UK manufacturers.)
The Business Case: Repair as a Revenue Channel
Compliance framing focuses on cost. The commercial framing focuses on something different: every repair is a re-engagement event.
A customer who bought your product a few years ago has largely vanished from your world. They bought through a retailer. They don't visit your website. Their warranty lapsed. The only time they think about your brand is when something goes wrong, and if the only outcome of "something went wrong" is a frustrating support ticket and a long wait for a part, that re-engagement event becomes a brand damage event.
Flip the model. When something goes wrong and the customer scans the product, finds a clear repair guide, orders the correct part in two clicks, and fixes it themselves in minutes, that re-engagement event becomes a loyalty event. The brand looks honest. The product looks well-made. The customer feels competent.
There are several commercial levers worth modelling for your own business:
- Customer retention. A customer who can keep a product working is a customer who stays attached to the brand for longer, which feeds directly into lifetime value.
- Parts revenue. Opening a genuine parts channel, including direct-to-consumer parts sales rather than only authorised repairer networks, turns a serviceable installed base into a recurring revenue line from customers you have already acquired.
- Support deflection. A well-structured digital repair guide can resolve a meaningful share of repair-related inbound contacts before they ever reach a human agent.
- Warranty cost. Where customers can diagnose and fix minor issues themselves, fewer borderline cases escalate into full in-warranty claims.
- Repairability as a purchase signal. As repairability scores appear on packaging and in listings (once harmonised EU scoring rules take effect under the Empowering Consumers Directive, and later via ESPR category rules), they become a comparison dimension that can influence which product a shopper chooses.
The size of each lever depends on your product category, price point, and installed base, so the discipline is to model them against your own numbers rather than assume a headline figure. The point is that none of these levers shows up in the compliance-cost view, yet together they can change whether a repair programme is a drain or a contributor.
The Support Deflection Multiplier
Every support ticket costs money to handle, and that cost scales with the installed base. A well-structured digital repair guide, accessible via a product scan, can deflect a share of repair-related inbound contacts to self-service resolution.
The arithmetic is worth running for your own business. Take your annual unit volume, your repair-related contact rate, and your fully loaded cost per contact, then apply a conservative deflection rate. Even a modest deflection percentage produces a saving that compounds as the installed base grows, because each new cohort of products adds to the contact volume the guides can absorb.
What Smart Manufacturers Are Already Doing
Fairphone: Repairability as the Product
Fairphone built repairability into the product brief from day one. Its modular design means components such as the battery, camera, screen, and speaker can be swapped by the user with basic tools. The company publishes repair guides and sells modules directly. Repairability, for Fairphone, is not a compliance overhead. It is the brand proposition, and that proposition is the lesson worth borrowing even if your products are not modular by design.
Patagonia: The Worn Wear Model
Patagonia's Worn Wear programme offers repair on Patagonia garments, operates repair facilities, and publishes a guide library. It also resells repaired garments, creating a secondary revenue stream while demonstrating product longevity.
Patagonia's insight was that a customer who repairs a garment stays attached to the brand rather than replacing the item with a competitor's. The repair event extends the relationship, and an extended relationship tends to increase lifetime value relative to the cost of the repair itself.
Independent Repair Ecosystems
Independent repair platforms and community repair events have built large libraries of repair documentation and active repairer communities. Some manufacturers have shifted from suppressing independent repair to working with these ecosystems, distributing genuine parts and documentation through channels they did not previously support. Manufacturers who supply documentation and parts to community repair events earn goodwill with an engaged, technically literate customer segment at relatively low cost.
The Digital Identity Layer: Repair Starts With a Scan
Regulations require repair information to exist. They do not specify where it lives or how it is accessed. Most manufacturers will default to a page buried in a support subdomain, findable only if the customer already knows the product model number and has enough patience to navigate a knowledge base.
That is the compliance floor. The commercial ceiling looks different.
When a product carries a scannable identity, such as a QR code, NFC tag, or digital watermark linked to a live product record, repair information becomes accessible at the moment of need, without friction. The customer does not need to know the model number. They do not need to find the manual. They scan the product they are holding, and the product tells them what they need to know.
That scan page can surface:
- Model-specific repair guides, not a generic library, but the exact guide for this product variant
- Parts ordering, direct to a genuine parts store, with the correct SKU pre-selected
- Service booking for repairs that require professional attention, a direct booking flow rather than a phone number
- Repair history log, a persistent record of what has been done to this specific unit, useful for resale, insurance, and ongoing service
This is where the atoms and bits divide becomes relevant. The physical product is fixed at manufacture. The digital layer above it, the scan destination, the guides, the parts links, can be updated the moment a new issue is identified, a better guide is written, or a supply chain change affects part availability. You are not reprinting manuals. You are updating a record.
Because repairability is a regulated DPP data field, the infrastructure required to publish a product's DPP can also serve repair data at the product level. Manufacturers who build this as a unified system of product identity, DPP fields, repair data, and parts links can build it once and contribute to multiple regulatory requirements from a single source of truth.
BrandedMark is built to be that layer. Each product gets a persistent digital identity. Repair guides, parts links, DPP fields, and service records all attach to that identity and are accessible from a scan. When regulations extend to new categories, the infrastructure is already in place.
What the Product-Level Identity Layer Adds
The repair information ecosystem already has strong independent guide platforms, vertically integrated repairability brands, and offline community repair networks. Each is valuable, and a manufacturer can engage with all of them.
What none of them provides on its own is a product-level link: a persistent, scannable digital identity that connects a specific unit to its specific repair information, parts history, and DPP record. A generic guide library tells a customer how to repair a model. A product-level identity tells them how to repair the exact unit in their hands, and keeps a record of what has been done to it. That gap, between model-level documentation and unit-level identity, is the one BrandedMark is built to fill.
The Repairability Score as a Marketing Asset
Repairability scoring, modelled on national repairability indices, is making its way into EU law through the Empowering Consumers Directive (2024/825), which has traders display a score where a producer publishes one, and through ESPR delegated acts that will set scoring rules category by category. The direction is a comparable repairability signal at the point of sale.
As those scores appear on product packaging and in retailer listings, comparison sites can sort by them. A better-rated product can sit above a worse-rated one in search results, the same way an energy efficiency label shapes appliance purchase decisions.
Manufacturers who invest in repairability infrastructure now will tend to have better labels by the time they are mandatory. Manufacturers who treat compliance as a minimum-viable exercise will be competing on a dimension where they have not invested, and it will show.
FAQ
What does the EU Right to Repair Directive actually require manufacturers to do?
The Directive, which member states must transpose into national law, requires manufacturers in covered categories to make spare parts and tools available at reasonable prices, supply repair information to independent repairers, and avoid practices that obstruct repair, such as restrictions that prevent non-OEM parts from functioning. It also sets up a voluntary European Repair Information Form and an EU platform for finding repairers. Point-of-sale repairability labelling is handled by separate instruments (the Empowering Consumers Directive and future ESPR delegated acts), not by 2024/1799 itself. The precise scope of covered products and the detail of each obligation are set out in the Directive and in the national laws that transpose it, and the scope is expected to widen over time, so check the current text for your category.
How does repairability connect to the Digital Product Passport?
The EU's ESPR framework, which provides for Digital Product Passports in regulated product categories, treats repairability as data the passport is designed to carry. A product's repairability information, spare parts availability, and links to repair documentation can all be surfaced through the DPP. Manufacturers who build DPP infrastructure are therefore also building repair information infrastructure. The open question is whether that infrastructure is consumer-accessible or locked inside a compliance database. See our wider coverage of manufacturer sustainability claims for more context on how DPP and sustainability disclosure interact.
Is investing in repair infrastructure worth it for products that aren't yet covered by legislation?
There is a reasonable case for it. First, the regulatory perimeter is expanding: the Right to Repair Directive provides for the scope to be reviewed and extended, so manufacturers who build repair infrastructure now may be ahead of mandates that later reach their category. Second, the commercial case around parts revenue, support deflection, and customer retention holds regardless of whether legislation requires it. The regulations are an accelerant; the business case can stand on its own, and you can validate it by modelling these levers against your own numbers before any mandate applies.
BrandedMark is the Product Operating System for manufacturers of physical goods, covering serialised product identity, connected experiences, warranty registration, and Digital Product Passport readiness in one platform. See how it works at brandedmark.com.