What to ask before opening a refill shop

Before signing a lease or choosing a wall of dispensers, learn how prospective customers already replenish the products you hope to sell. The useful question is what happens when something runs out. A person can like the idea of a refill shop and still have a routine that makes visiting one difficult. An interview should help you understand that routine in enough detail to make a better decision.

Start with a small research question: what would a refill purchase need to fit into a particular neighborhood shopping trip? That is narrower than asking whether people care about the environment. It can produce decisions about location, hours, container options and the first product category. Five initial interviews can uncover questions worth testing, but they are an exploratory round, not a representative market survey.

Recruit for the behavior you need to understand

Write a short recruitment brief. Identify the neighborhood or shopping area, the relevant product category and the kinds of routines you want to hear about. Include people who already refill and people who currently buy packaged products. If every participant comes from an enthusiastic community group, you may learn a great deal about that group while missing the obstacles faced by other shoppers.

Ask enough screening questions to establish relevance without collecting unnecessary personal details. Someone who regularly buys household cleaning products can discuss that task without disclosing their household income or exact address. Explain the topic, expected time and how notes will be used. Obtain agreement before recording, and offer a way to participate without a recording where practical.

Choose an accessible setting. A quiet conversation near the shopping area might work, but check that the participant can speak comfortably. Do not assume everyone can attend during working hours or use the same video platform. A modest adjustment to the session format can help you hear from people whose routines differ from your own.

Begin with the last real purchase

Open with a concrete event: ask the person to describe the last time they bought the product. Let them choose their own starting point. Then follow the sequence. What told them it was time to buy? Where were they when they noticed? Did they make a list? Who actually went to the shop? What else was being purchased at the same time?

These details can reveal where your proposed offer belongs. A planned weekend trip differs from an urgent evening purchase. A person carrying groceries on foot faces a different container problem from someone loading a car. Treat those as design constraints to investigate. Avoid deciding during the interview that one routine is more responsible or desirable than another.

The GOV.UK guide to in-depth interviews advises using neutral questions and focusing on actual examples. A useful follow-up asks what happened next. A leading follow-up supplies your preferred explanation, such as assuming that packaging was the person's main concern. Write reminders in your guide to let the participant finish before suggesting a reason.

Understand the container journey

Ask what happens to the container after the product is finished. The answer might involve a cupboard, a recycling bin, another household member or uncertainty. If the participant already uses refills, ask them to describe the last successful trip and a time the trip did not work. The missed trip may tell you more about the service than the smooth one.

Explore the physical details without turning the conversation into an inspection. Where would an empty bottle wait? What bag would carry it? Would the person remember which product it held? If they are comfortable showing an object, let them explain it. Do not photograph their home or belongings without permission, and avoid collecting images that are not needed for the question.

A refill process can also involve more than one shopper. Ask whether someone else sometimes buys the product and how information gets passed between them. A system that only works for the person who first visited the shop may be fragile. The answer could suggest a clearer label, a standard container option or a purchase record, but keep those as ideas until you have heard the rest of the story.

Ask about choice and price without staging a pitch

When discussing the last purchase, ask which alternatives were considered and what made the chosen product acceptable. The participant may mention scent, familiarity, size, availability or cost. Ask them to explain what they mean. A statement that something was expensive is less useful than understanding which comparison they made and whether they still bought it.

Avoid asking what they would pay for a vague future service. Instead, learn how they compare current options. If you later test a concrete price, show the unit, quantity, container cost and any return arrangement clearly. Keep that exercise separate from the habit interview so you can distinguish a reaction to the proposed offer from a description of existing behavior.

Do not defend the concept when someone raises a difficulty. If they say they would forget a bottle, ask about similar things they have tried to remember. If they say the shop is out of the way, ask them to describe their route. A founder's explanation can easily turn an interview into a sales conversation and remove the very objection the research was meant to uncover.

Use a short, repeatable guide

A practical discussion guide can fit on two pages. Begin with an introduction and consent reminder. Follow with the last purchase, the product decision, transport and storage, the empty container, and any refill experience. Leave room at the end for questions you did not anticipate. A consistent structure helps comparison, while a little flexibility allows useful surprises.

Test the guide with a colleague before recruiting. The purpose is to catch confusing wording and awkward transitions, not to count that person as customer evidence. Time the conversation and remove questions that do not inform a decision. If the guide feels like a questionnaire being read aloud, combine related prompts and give the participant more room to tell the story.

During the session, separate direct observations from your interpretations. A note that the participant bought a replacement on the way home is different from the conclusion that convenience matters most. Mark the first as evidence and the second as a hypothesis. This habit makes the later discussion more honest and prevents a memorable phrase from carrying more weight than it should.

Turn five conversations into a next test

Create one row per participant and columns for purchase trigger, route, product choice, container handling and unresolved question. Look for repeated obstacles, but preserve differences. If two people plan ahead and three buy only when they run out, that may suggest two situations to test. It does not establish the proportions in the whole neighborhood.

For an illustrative synthesis, suppose several participants describe forgetting containers during otherwise suitable shopping trips. A next test could offer a clear container fallback at a permitted pilot stall. Record how people use it and what they understand about the next visit. That is a more direct experiment than concluding that an awareness campaign is needed.

Finish with a short decision note: what the interviews changed, what remains uncertain and what observable behavior would help answer it. Schedule the next test before adding more speculative questions. The best result from five conversations may be a smaller first offer and a more precise reason to try it.