Arvada, Colorado, USA

Homefill is a refill shop in Olde Town Arvada, Colorado, owned by Kim Whitehead. It sells personal-care and home products in bulk — shampoo, body wash, lotion, sunscreen, cleaning products, cooking oils — which customers buy by weight into their own or store-provided reusable containers, alongside other low-waste goods. Local reporting (5280 magazine, 2025) states that Homefill kept over 9,500 bottles out of landfill in 2024. This is a small, neighbourhood-scale case and is included as a realistic counterpoint to the large-scale cases: it shows the bring-your-own-container refillery model genuinely works and has measurable impact, but at the scale of a single independent shop serving committed local customers. It supports the integrated DTC solution mainly by marking the realistic floor — this is the niche, goodwill-and-affluence-driven version of refill that already exists widely. The proposed DTC concentrate-refill model is an attempt to break past exactly this scale ceiling by removing the in-store dispensing and the consumer's trip, and by funding the system on margin rather than goodwill. Greenpeace has reported a surge in popularity of refill shops since 2017, so Homefill is representative of a broad category rather than a unique case.