About Upcyclisten

Upcyclisten is a small Berlin-based shop bringing SANGKHUM's upcycled bags and accessories to the German and wider EU market. We don't manufacture anything ourselves. The craft is all at SANGKHUM in Phnom Penh. Upcyclisten handles the European side of the supply chain: import logistics, customer service in German and English, EU compliance, and getting the products to market.

How Upcyclisten started

The shop began through a personal connection — one of the founders visited SANGKHUM in 2018 during a longer Southeast Asia trip, came back with three bags as gifts, and within six months had everyone they knew asking where they came from. By the end of 2018 we'd put together a small business plan, registered the Berlin GmbH, and run our first import shipment from Phnom Penh.

The first year was figuring out logistics — import duties, EU consumer protection requirements, GDPR-compliant data handling, the right shipping partners. The second year was building a customer base. By year three we had a steady quarterly import cycle and a small but committed group of repeat customers.

What we do (and don't do)

What we handle on this side of the supply chain:

• Quarterly import shipments from Phnom Penh by sea freight
• Receiving, photographing, and listing each piece
• Order fulfillment from our small Berlin storage facility — usually same-day or next-day dispatch
• Customer service in German and English (Khmer enquiries are forwarded to SANGKHUM directly)
• EU VAT registration and customs paperwork
• Marketing — Instagram, occasional pop-up events at Berlin sustainable-fashion markets, word-of-mouth

What SANGKHUM handles:

• All design and production decisions
• Material sourcing and cleaning
• Quality control before shipping
• Their own workshop operations and worker management

We don't art-direct the line, we don't impose Western design preferences, and we don't push for a Western retail calendar. SANGKHUM decides what to make; we sell what they decide.

Why we're small (and staying small)

Two reasons:

• SANGKHUM's capacity is the binding constraint. A workshop of 25 people can only produce so many pieces per quarter. Growing Upcyclisten faster than SANGKHUM can grow wouldn't be sustainable for them — and the whole point of the model is supporting fair-wage employment, not maximising our import volume.
• Quality at scale is hard. The current size lets us inspect every piece on arrival, photograph it individually, and ship it personally. We'd lose that with significant growth.

We hit our annual revenue target around year four (without VC funding or external financing — just revenue and the founder's initial loan). The business is now self-sustaining at its current size; we'd rather refine than expand.

The Berlin operation

The Upcyclisten team is three people: a co-founder who handles operations and customer service, a co-founder who handles imports and supplier relations (and who makes the annual Phnom Penh visits), and a part-time photographer/social media person who joined in 2022.

Our Berlin office is small — essentially a storage facility plus a desk. We don't run a public showroom but visits are by appointment (we keep open hours on Wednesday afternoons for anyone who wants to see pieces in person before ordering).

EU compliance

Specific things we comply with for EU sales:

• EU consumer protection (right of withdrawal, etc.)
• GDPR for customer data (data hosted in Germany, no third-party sharing without explicit consent)
• EU customs documentation for every import shipment
• Cambodian export documentation matched against EU import — full supply chain traceability for every piece
• Sustainability claim documentation — every "fair trade" or "upcycled" claim we make is backed by documentation we can produce on request

Wholesale

We work with a handful of European independent retailers — small sustainable fashion shops in Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Amsterdam, and a couple in northern Italy. Wholesale is a small part of our business but a stable one; if you run a sustainable-fashion shop and would like to carry the line, write to us with your shop details.

Get in touch

Email [email protected] — for orders, sizing questions, custom requests, wholesale enquiries, visits, or anything else. Auf Deutsch oder Englisch. Antworten meist innerhalb eines Werktags.