The Right-to-Repair Gear Index: Ranking 20 Outdoor Brands on Repairability

Seven criteria, weighted by practical importance. Published spare-parts catalogue with part numbers (20 percent): the single strongest predictor of whether a repair is possible without asking permission. Priced parts available to consumers (15 percent). Publicly documented repair procedures, including video or illustrated guidance (15 percent). Design for disassembly — construction that allows component replacement without destroying adjacent materials (15 percent). Repair service pricing transparency and cost relative to new retail (15 percent). Turnaround time reported by users (10 percent). Repairability documentation on the product page itself, rather than only in a sustainability report (10 percent). We scored only what is verifiable from public information and user reports, not what brands say they intend to do.

Only four of twenty brands publish a genuine spare-parts catalogue with part numbers and prices. Nine provide parts on request through customer service, which sounds equivalent and is not: the friction of an email thread, an unclear part identity and an unknown price deters most users. Five brands publish repair procedures with any usable detail. Turnaround, based on 312 user-reported repairs, has a median of 18 days excluding shipping, with a long tail: 22 percent of repairs took more than five weeks, and in those cases most users said they had bought a replacement in the meantime. The clearest pattern is that repairability correlates with ownership structure and product architecture, not with company size. Smaller brands with modular product lines consistently outperformed large brands with bonded, monolithic construction.

The technical barrier to repair is almost always construction choice, and those choices are made years before the repair conversation. Bonded seams cannot be separated without destroying the laminate. Welded pockets and glued zipper tapes resist replacement. Foam laminated directly to face fabric makes both components unrecoverable. Compare that with a jacket using sewn seams, stitched-in zippers and replaceable cord hardware: a competent tailor can service it indefinitely. We found that brands scoring in our top quartile used sewn rather than bonded construction on the majority of load-bearing seams, and specified replaceable hardware at design review. This costs a small amount of weight and aesthetic cleanliness. It buys decades of service life. Given that the sector's own data shows extremely high interest in repair among consumers, it is puzzling how rarely the trade-off is made.

Repair only happens when it is cheaper and easier than replacement. Our sample shows typical repair costs of 12 to 35 percent of new retail, which is a range where users repair readily; beyond roughly 40 percent, industry data indicates they overwhelmingly replace. Two mechanisms keep costs down. First, subsidised service: brands that treat repair as marketing rather than as a profit centre absorb labour costs and charge for parts only. Second, standardisation: when a single zipper specification serves an entire product family, technicians keep fewer parts and achieve higher throughput. The brands in our index with the fastest turnarounds both used narrow standardised component sets. The brands with the slowest turnarounds operated bespoke part inventories across many product generations.

Repairability is moving from brand virtue to legal requirement. European ecodesign work on textiles includes repairability and spare-parts availability, and France's repairability index already applies a mandatory scoring scale to certain consumer categories, with textiles under active consideration. Extended producer responsibility schemes in several member states will assign fees partly on the basis of repairability and recyclability. The practical consequence for consumers in 2026 and 2027 is that repairability information will become more standardised and more comparable, which is exactly what our index had to improvise. Until then, use the criteria yourself: ask for a part number before you buy, check whether a repair procedure exists, and treat a reparability claim without a published parts list as marketing rather than policy.