Oberalp Contribute Report 2025: repairs rise 19% as resale falls 20%

A narrower definition of circular

When Salewa turned 90 this year, Oberalp marked it with a limited edition product made from fabric that’s 100 percent recycled polyester. More than half of that, 51 percent, came from textile-to-textile (T2T) recycling rather than recycled plastic bottles, a distinction Oberalp cares about because pulling PET from the bottle stream competes with a separate recycling loop that’s supposed to keep making bottles.

LaMunt, the Group’s brand for women in the mountains, took a different route on some fleece products this year, switching to 100 percent polyester fabrics so garments sort and recycle more easily down the line. Even so, some zippers and trims still have to be pulled out by hand before recycling, since polyester substitutes haven’t matched the performance those parts need. Given how far collection and sorting infrastructure still lags the ambition, Oberalp won’t call these products fully circular or fully recyclable. Its own phrase is “designed with circularity in mind,” a hedge that’s more honest than most sustainability reports bother to be.

Repair is climbing. Resale isn’t.

Here’s the tension that doesn’t show up in the top-line messaging. Group wide repair volumes rose from 3,104 items in 2024 to 3,705 in 2025, up 19 percent, with Salewa’s own Care & Repair Hub in Kiefersfelden handling 2,700 of those repairs on its own. Over the same period, the resale side of the business, what Oberalp calls Second Life, moved the other way: down from 2,064 items to 1,650, a drop of 20 percent, and the second straight year of decline after 2,603 items in 2023.

Oberalp’s public messaging leans on a different number, more than 7,000 products given a second life since 2023. That’s true in cumulative terms, but it papers over an annual resale channel that keeps shrinking even as repair, the cheaper service to run, keeps growing.

A commitment, not yet a target

Oberalp wants to halve its direct and indirect emissions by 2030, using 2024 as its baseline, and reach net zero by 2050. It has ruled out offsetting from the start, betting instead on actually removing emissions rather than paying to cancel them out on paper. The Group’s Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) Commitment was submitted and accepted in 2025, though Oberalp is upfront that this only marks the beginning of target setting. Validated targets aren’t expected until 2026.

Its first complete Corporate Carbon Footprint, covering emissions across Scope 1 through 3, turned up more gaps in data quality than a finished picture of where its carbon actually comes from. Oberalp says more than 80 percent of its measured climate impact traces back to its products, mostly fabric production.

Human rights due diligence, built into onboarding

In 2025, Oberalp folded human rights due diligence directly into how it brings new suppliers on board, on top of a Code of Conduct that’s already mandatory across its supply chain. Four of its brands, Salewa, Dynafit, Wild Country and LaMunt, kept Fair Wear’s “Good” performance rating. Separately, 83 percent of the Group’s 2025 apparel and footwear styles passed chemical verification under its own restricted substances policy. About the same share of production, also 83 percent, happens in Asia, which Oberalp says is where most of its labor monitoring is focused.

What this means for the rest of the industry

Oberalp’s timing offers a real lesson for other multi-brand groups still figuring out their own climate reporting. The Group got its SBTi Commitment accepted before its carbon data was fully sorted out, and that acceptance started the public clock without requiring validated targets right away.

A company still building its emissions data infrastructure doesn’t have to wait for clean numbers before committing publicly. It can commit first, spend the following year getting the data right, and validate once the picture actually holds together. The same logic extends to language. As the EU’s Green Claims Directive starts to narrow what companies can say about their environmental performance, a phrase like “designed with circularity in mind” shows just how much room is left to say less than you might want to and still mean every word of it.

Resale focused brands have a harder lesson to take from this report. A cumulative number can hide a declining trend, and Oberalp’s own figures make that case better than any warning could. Repair keeps climbing. Resale keeps shrinking. And the “more than 7,000 products given a second life” figure keeps climbing right alongside it, because a running total only ever adds up, never down. Any brand running a take back or resale program should show the annual numbers, not just the running total. A figure that only ever goes up invites exactly the scrutiny it gets once someone checks what’s underneath it.