You are Sabine Herrmann, 45, newly appointed Sustainability Lead at Helvar Werkzeuge, a 55-year-old Stuttgart maker of professional power tools. The owners have given you eighteen months and EUR 24 million to redesign the business model without letting EBIT margin fall below 10%. Before anything else they want your diagnosis: where is today's model losing the most value?
The situation
Helvar makes drills, saws and hedge trimmers for tradespeople and serious hobbyists across German-speaking Europe: EUR 280 million of revenue last year, 1,300 people and a 12% EBIT margin. It sells mostly through retailers, with a smaller direct channel that is growing. Its products are over-engineered on purpose: a tool carrying its badge is built to run for 15 years or more. Its commercial planning, though, assumes the customer buys a new one every five to seven years.
On Monday 23 November 2026 the owners left you two documents with the same note. One summarises new European rules that will require manufacturers to prove, within eighteen months, that tools can be repaired rather than replaced. The other is a client list: two trade accounts worth EUR 14 million between them have moved to ToolFlow, a venture-backed rival that rents tools by subscription. The mandate is to redesign the model for measurable ecological and social value, spending up to 24 million and staying above a 10% margin.
The owners' scorecard reads ecological value 12 out of 100, social value 10 and coherence of the new approach 0, because there is none yet. You spent nine years running the durability lab; the sales force is paid on units shipped and the factory is tooled for volume. Your team has gathered four candidates for the main "leak": packaging and shipping on the direct channel, the factory's energy use, the campaigns that push new-unit sales, and the replacement habit itself.