Brands spend billions of dollars on marketing, but when a product reaches the end of its life, that connection to the consumer typically disappears. That makes it harder to tackle waste—consumers might not know how to recycle a product, or, in some cases, no good option for recycling or reuse exists. The last moments with a product might end with guilt, or indifference. It’s as bad for the brand as it is for the environment.

The problem inspired U.K.-based product designer Joe Macleod to become an “endineer,” focused on helping companies design better endings both for physical products and for digital services. We talked to Macleod, the founder of an agency called AndEnd, about how brands can begin to rethink the consumer experience when products break, no longer fit, or get replaced by a shinier, newer gadget.

The current product lifecycle, where we dig up resources to make products that often quickly end up in landfills, causes obvious environmental problems. But you also argue that ignoring what happens at the end of a product’s life is just a bad experience for the consumer. Can you talk more about why ‘endineering’ is important?

As a business, we build up things like brand equity, engagement, loyalty, and all of these good things for onboarding and usage. And we walk away from that at the end. The end of the consumer lifecycle is a very different place, barren of experience and emotion. We have increasingly used shaming at the end of the consumer lifecycle to get adherence by consumers to do the right thing. And it’s a real shame that they have to be burdened with the last third of the consumer lifecycle. It’s unguided, uninstructed, and a very different experience.

What’s one example of a company that’s handling that ending in a better way?

Fairphone [the Dutch company that designed a mobile phone that’s easy to repair and upgrade without replacing] offers encouragement for the consumer to open up the phone, change the camera, change the battery. And that partnership and encouragement is really empowering to the consumer, and it’s bonding between Fairphone and the consumer as well. There’s a big community where it’s not about shaming—’we should reclaim your materials, offset your carbon’—it’s about empowerment to do something about it. You’re not saying you should do this, it’s like, you can do this. You have empowerment to do this.

Fairphone is interesting because it’s trying to help consumers keep phones as long as possible rather than trying to sell a new model as often as possible. How hard is it for other companies to make that switch?

When I go into businesses and start talking to them about endings, one of the biggest hurdles to get over is people’s perception of what an ending is and how to imagine that. I often get a response that, hey, if we create a good ending, then we’ll make another sale. It’s about another sale. And it’s really hard to unravel that for people . . . If you turn to Apple shareholders or Samsung shareholders or any big company’s shareholders and said, ‘We’re not going to sell as many phones and we’re going to do ‘degrowth,’ their share price would collapse.

What options do companies have if they rely on a model of selling as many products as possible?

One route is to charge a higher price for the product, and add more value and experience at the end. Build in meaningful experiences around the end of product life. Capture 100% of materials. Second, move to a service model. Many high-value product companies are doing this. Car companies are a good example. But lower mass market products will have a harder time building meaning at a reasonable price here. Third, [companies could] build a more valuable relationship with the consumer about solving issues at the end, through direct branded experiences instead of the standard municipal, governmental routes.

When a company wants to redesign the ending for a product, where should they start?

If you’re in a product development meeting, when there’s a quiet moment, just ask, ‘How does this product end?’ It’s the simplest question. And I promise you, it will be baffling to everyone in the room. When we ask that question, we can ask it on a number of levels. How does this product end in a physical sense? How does it decay, how do we reclaim it? How does it end in a consumer experience sense?

We have a passion about how our customers engage with our products, how they use our products. We spend a lot of money investing and improving that. We don’t invest in how it ends, how we make that consumer experience of the end smooth, grounded, uplifting, bonding between the consumer and the provider, and target it so we get the right things to happen at the end of product life, and then we can reclaim it accurately through reverse logistics.

If a company reclaims its products, can that change how it designs them—for example, might it choose to use more expensive materials if those will later come back?

I think there’s layers of knowledge and data from it as well. If you’re having a conversation at the end of product life with the consumer in a meaningful sense, then you can really get a lot of data out of how it’s being used, how it’s being broken, how it’s failed.

Electrolux did interesting work by reclaiming vacuum cleaners out of the electronic waste stream and then analyzing how they broke. Most of them were really almost functional. They weren’t that broken. Only one of them was critically broken, and the majority of them could be fixed by a consumer with a bit more knowledge. [Ed. note: Electrolux then designed products that could last longer, and launched a subscription service to take back old vacuums for repair and recycling.] They dismantled that almost as archaeology. We don’t need to do that if we create off-boarding experiences where we’re in partnership with that individual.

What are some of the other advantages of redesigning a product’s ending?

If we’re aiming to create a circular company and a circular product supply chain, if we don’t start engaging at the end of the product experience, we have very little likelihood of reclaiming those materials accurately. We need to have a robust ending experience so we have a healthy communication with the person. We’re still in a strong partnership with the individual, the consumer. And we’re branding those sort of pieces of communication as we start to reclaim materials, do reverse logistics, and that sort of off-boarding experience. And then we reclaim very much more accurately. So we’re not going to the wide open recyclable plastics market, we’re reclaiming it directly.

If the broader infrastructure for circularity isn’t working well—whether that’s recycling plastic or collecting products for reuse—does that mean that companies should set up their own systems?

I think it’s really important for businesses to look at endings as a place of value engagement and opportunity to almost remove themselves from the waste stream on some level.