Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important purchasing criterion for sports and outdoor items. Surveys show: Two thirds of the sports and fitness participants surveyed in Germany would pay more for a comparable, more sustainable product. Retailers and specialist shops therefore play a central role in the transformation: Qualified advice that goes beyond pure application and includes eco-social aspects can promote a sustainable lifestyle. Targeted advertising for more sustainable products and testing, return and repair services provide transformative impulses for customers. Retailers also influence safe, health-promoting sport through the product selection in their range.

Whether stationary or online: The pioneers among retailers are strengthening the trends towards fairness and resource conservation in the outdoor, fitness and sports sectors. Hundreds of thousands of people still work under precarious working conditions in globalized supply chains for sporting goods. Although a coveted jersey in the store easily costs over 100 euros, workers often only earn cents.

Large retailers in particular can use their market power to influence fairer value creation and, for example, have recently been able to enable end customers to make additional direct payments to local workers at the POS using new digital solutions. Digitalization supports qualified, sustainability-oriented sales advice in retail, e.g. through QR codes on the item or via app. Transformative processes can be established in logistics and transport as well as returns through the use of renewable energies, e-mobility, sustainable returns regulations and smart recycling of returned items.

The industry includes, for example, retail sales of sports and camping items and sports equipment.