The Refill Revolution in Your Cleaning Cupboard

Nick Torday and Marcus Hill built Bower Collective to eliminate household plastic waste. Their model is circular by design.

The average UK household throws away around 40 plastic cleaning product bottles every year.

Nick Torday and Marcus Hill thought there had to be a better way.

In 2019, the two friends — Nick from a background in digital and technology businesses, Marcus from sustainability and consumer goods — founded Bower Collective. Their mission: eliminate household plastic waste through a circular economy model that makes sustainable living genuinely simple.

The Model

Bower's model is built around a proprietary packaging system called the BowerPack. Customers order their cleaning and personal care products — laundry detergent, washing up liquid, hand wash, and more — in concentrated refill pouches. They pour the concentrate into their reusable Bower bottles, and when the pouch is empty, they send it back to Bower for free.

Bower then recycles the pouches through their own closed-loop system — something that most conventional recycling infrastructure cannot handle.

The Subscription Engine

Bower operates primarily as a subscription business. Customers sign up for a regular delivery of refill pouches, which arrive through the letterbox (no missed deliveries) and are used to top up their reusable bottles.

The subscription model is well suited to cleaning products for the same reason it works for Who Gives A Crap: these are non-discretionary, repeat purchases. Once a customer has invested in the reusable bottles and established the habit, the friction of switching is high.

The B Corp Commitment

Bower became a certified B Corp in their early years — a significant commitment for a startup, given the rigour of the assessment process.

The B Corp certification is not just a badge. It is a governance commitment. B Corps are legally required to consider the interests of all stakeholders — employees, communities, the environment — not just shareholders. For a business built around a circular economy mission, this alignment between legal structure and commercial purpose is important.

The Expert Commentary

Bower Collective is solving a problem that most sustainable product companies ignore: the last mile of the circular economy.

It is relatively easy to make a product with sustainable ingredients. It is much harder to build the infrastructure to recover the packaging at the end of its life. Bower has invested in that infrastructure — the BowerPack return system, the recycling partnerships, the logistics — and that investment is the real competitive moat.

For impact founders in the product space, this is a critical lesson. The sustainability of a product is not determined by what it is made of. It is determined by what happens to it at the end of its life. The founders who build the end-of-life infrastructure are the ones who can make genuine claims about circularity.

What I Would Do If I Were Nick and Marcus

Bower's biggest opportunity is B2B. The same model that works for households — concentrated refills, reusable containers, closed-loop returns — works even better for offices, hotels, and commercial facilities, where the volumes are higher and the procurement decisions are made by people with sustainability KPIs.

A corporate programme, with branded dispensers and a managed return service, would generate higher margins, more predictable revenue, and stronger sustainability credentials than the consumer subscription model alone.