As soon as your order is processed (usually within 1 business day), we will send you your tracking number in a shipment confirmation email. Please check your spam folder if you did not receive it. Find out about your order’s progress and expected delivery date on www.fedex.com.

If you need to change the address or delivery date, please contact FedEx and submit your tracking number.

Europe:
Toll Free Telephone: 0800 123 800
at.ccsupport@fedex.com

International:
Toll Free Telephone: 1 800 463 3339

All the people involved in making your Qwstion product do their best to ensure it will be a companion that you can rely on everyday and will go the extra mile for you.

To make sure we are helping customers who invest in the original, we ask for proof that it was bought directly from our stores or one of our trusted official stockists. 

Our warranty does not cover damage caused by inappropriate use. For further details check our general terms and conditions page sections F and I.

We welcome returns within 30 days of purchase for new items that are unused, unworn and undamaged. These must be in their original packaging, with all tags attached. Please contact returns@qwstion.com. Your email should include your order number in the subject line and reason for the return. Special-priced items are final sale – no exchanges, returns, or warranty.

For warranty claims, please make sure to include a picture of the claimed defect, a picture showing the entire item and a picture of the tag located inside your bag, as well as proof of purchase (receipt, invoice etc.) in digital format.

If your claim is accepted, customer service will provide you with a return number, so you can send your item back. We advise you to use a traceable carrier service. QWSTION is not liable for returns sent without registered mail options.

As soon as your order is processed (usually within 1 business day), we will send you your tracking number in a shipment confirmation email. Please check your spam folder if you can’t find it in your inbox. Track your order’s progress and expected delivery date via www.fedex.com.

If you need to change the address or delivery date, please contact FedEx and submit your tracking number.
Europe:Toll Free Telephone: 0800 123 800
International:Toll Free Telephone: 1 800 463 3339

As shipping adds to the footprint of any product, we advocate for considering your choice well before buying. It is not possible to change your order once it has been processed and sent, but you can always return unwanted deliveries at your own expense. Thank you for your understanding.
If you have any urgent questions regarding our goods, send us an e-mail to wecare@qwstion.com.

We accept VISA, MASTERCARD, JCB, DISCOVER, AMERICAN EXPRESS and TWINT. You can also choose to pay via PAYPAL. Depending on your shipping destination we also accept Banktransfer. Your payment data is secured by WALLEE, a leading and innovative payment provider. To ensure safety, your transactions are encrypted via secure socket layer (ssl).

SWITZERLAND:
Shipping within Switzerland is free for orders above a value of CHF 200.
Shipping cost for orders with a value below the above mentioned, is 8.50 CHF.

EU or USA:
Shipping costs for orders to the EU or USA start from:

EU: 20 CHF
USA: 30 CHF

Shipping costs to other countries will be calculated at check out.

Please note: shipments which are outside the European Union, Switzerland or the USA may be subject to import duties and taxes. These are charged once the parcel reaches its destination country and must be paid by the recipient of the parcel.

Unfortunately we have no control over these fees and cannot predict what they may be, as customs policies and import duties vary widely from country to country.

The following shipment lead times are estimates, and cannot be guaranteed. All shipments are sent with FedEx and a tracking number will be automatically sent to you once the order leaves our warehouse. Shipment times may take longer during holiday seasons.

SWITZERLAND:
2-3 days standard shipping
1-2 days priority shipping

EU:
2-3 days standard shipping
1-2 days priority shipping

USA:
2-3 days for priority shipping

INTERNATIONAL:
2-7 days for priority shipping

Please note: shipments which are outside the European Union, Switzerland or the USA may be subject to import duties and taxes. These are charged once the parcel reaches its destination country and must be paid by the recipient of the parcel.

Unfortunately we have no control over these fees and cannot predict what they may be, as customs policies and import duties vary widely from country to country.

Just drop customer service a line: onlineshop@qwstion.com. Due to structural internal changes, answering questions may currently take a little longer. We thank you for your understanding.

Of course, you can buy in our SHOP in Zurich and you can find the list of partners selling QWSTION products under STORES.

Our bags are designed for daily use in urban environments and the materials we use are made to last – some of our customers have been using their QWSTION bags everyday for several years. What this exactly means for your own carry scenario will be up to you to find out.

If needed, hand wash your QWSTION item using a soft cloth and lukewarm water. Air dry thoroughly, leather and metal parts should be washed and dried extra carefully. Do not machine wash or tumble dry. QWSTION products are warranted to be free from manufacturing defects for two years from original date of purchase. This applies when used for the purpose intended and under normal conditions.

Find a short video here.

We offer a 2-year warranty limited to manufacturing mishaps, in line with Swiss and EU-legislation. All the people involved in making your QWSTION product do their best to ensure it will be a companion that you can rely on everyday to go the extra mile with you. As per common practice, our warranty does not cover damage caused by inappropriate use, but the repair workshops at our store will always help to find solutions to prolong the life of your bag.

If you need to repair your bag please follow: Repair inquiry

Get in touch with us if you need more answers: wecare@qwstion.com

Gift cards are redeemable through www.qwstion.com or in our store. If your purchase exceeds the value of the gift card, the remainder can be submitted using our standard payment options. Valid for 5 years from the date of purchase.
Subject to our Returns Policy, once an item has been returned, your refund will be credited to a new gift card.

We welcome returns within 30 days of purchase for new items that are unused, unworn and undamaged. These must be in their original packaging, with all tags attached. Please contact returns@qwstion.com. Your email should include your order number in the subject line and reason for the return.

If you need to repair your bag please follow: Repair inquiry

Once we have reviewed the details, our team will find the best solution with you, no matter if the claim is warranted or not.

We offer repairs at non-profit rates at the workshop in Zurich.

If you need to repair your bag please follow: Repair inquiry

If needed, hand wash your QWSTION item using a soft cloth and lukewarm water. Air dry thoroughly, leather and metal parts should be washed and dried extra carefully. Do not machine wash or tumble dry. Have a look at this video showing how to clean your bag – and get our tried and tested cleaning items for best results.

Currently we have few vegan options, but more and more are free of leather. Unfortunately most vegan solutions today contain petroleum – and because our first priority is sustainability we avoid plastic.
For instance, to make our bags waterproof the best solution we could find is a natural wax made of 25% beeswax. This allows our plant fibre materials to retain their biodegradability, but it’s not vegan. Some of our handles, as well as bottom reinforcements are made of vegetable-tanned leather, because of it's exceptional longevity. And the best material for shock absorption with biodegradability is natural wool felt – also not vegan.

Plastics do offer a high level of functionality at a very low price, which is why they are commonly used. For instance, popular vegan leathers like pineapple, cactus and apple leather use Polyurethane or Polymers - unfortunately at the cost of our planet, because they are neither biodegradable nor recyclable.

For some years we have been investigating plant-based water resistance methods and alternatives to leather. Our goal ist to be plastic free AND vegan by 2025 and we believe fully biodegradable options will be ready by then.

Here’s a good read on the topic.

Repair, reuse, recycle. Any product will some day reach a point where you no longer want, need or use it anymore. If this happens to your QWSTION bag please get in touch, so we can find the best lifecycle solution for you: wecare@qwstion.com.

Everyday we question the norm. We question how things are designed, made and used, to find better ways that benefit both humans and nature. And because it all began in sWitzerland, we slipped a W in – QWSTION is our answer.

QWSTION was founded in 2008 in Switzerland. We couldn’t find the bag we were looking for, so we decided to make our own - by questioning the norm. In a world with enough of everything, it was clear to us that we had a responsibility to do things in the most sustainable way possible. Influenced by our Swiss design heritage we aimed to create essentials that would be useful everyday, aesthetically closing the gap between fashion and function. Three of the five original founders are still actively involved today, and in 2018 several longterm team members became partners in the company.

What if we could suck CO2 from the air and transform it into oxygen and useful fibres? With a system that is solarpowered, bio-degradable and regrows naturally? Welcome to the world of plants.At the same time, plastic is one of the biggest contributors to climate change. Almost all plastics are derived from fossilised carbon (petroleum), and greenhouse gases are released at all production stages. What is called ‘recycling’ is actually down cycling and leads to the production of even more new plastic. It’s quite simple: if you take a bottle to make a bag out of it, a new bottle is produced instead. Preventing any further extraction of fossilised carbon is key to solving the climate crisis. This more in-depth articlesummarises everything we’ve learned.

Generally speaking, the term describes the ‘ability to self-sustain’. Today’s linear economy, based on taking-making-consuming-discarding, is the opposite of sustainable, as resources are depleted – and the Anthropocene, our new age in which humans are the dominant influence on the planet, needs new solutions that holistically consider the impact of our actions. Our vision of the future is regenerative: one in which we care for humans and nature, leaving the current system (and plastic) behind.

In 2018, after three years of research and development we launched Bananatex®, a waterproof fabric made from 100% natural banana fibres organically cultivated in the Philippine highlands. Its regenerative origins, strength and biodegradability put it at the forefront of sustainable material development.

Bananatex is Cradle-to-Cradle Certified® Gold, and is the material we use most of. On top it has won us several of the most important awards, including the Swiss Design Prize, and the German Sustainability Award.

Our goal was to create a viable alternative to the plastic based fabrics that currently dominate the textile industry. To increase its positive impact we’ve developed Bananatex® as an open source project, making it available to other brands, too – so if you work for a company or have a project going where plastic textiles could be replaced with plants, find more about Bananatex here.

We design and develop everything at the QWSTION studio in Switzerland, yet have selected our manufacturing partners globally, benefitting from their specific expertise. Working closely with our collaborators is key to develop a range of high quality everyday goods made almost entirely from natural materials. Our goal is to act responsibly for future generations, and after a lot of research, we discovered it was more important to focus on how we produced than where – as transportation, when shipped, is not the defining aspect of a product’s foot print.

Accordingly, our supply chain today begins where the Abacá banana plants grow: in the Philippines. The fibre is then shipped to Taiwan, where we spin and weave it into Bananatex. Our (relatively small) manufacturing partners are currently in Switzerland, Czech Republic and in China, depending on the complexity of the product – the latter having the biggest and most skilled team of craftswomen and -men. Our Chinese partners in the city of Huizhou, close to Hongkong, are certified to European standards, and we actually have the closest and longest running relationship with them, which is why, in spite of growing political challenges, we’re continuing our collaboration with the team there.

But let’s put things into context: Nowadays, "Made in Italy" for instance rarely means what we think, because globalisation has made supply chains difficult to track. And provenance of materials is usually not accounted for. We believe that understanding every part of our supply chain is key to offering transparency and assuming responsibility.

According to latest data, transportation by waterways has a twenty times lower CO2 footprint than trucking. This is part of the reason why we decided to develop a supply chain with global partners and focus on maximum sustainability, as well as skill. We generally try to avoid air travel and keep trucking distances as short as possible. Transporting our fabrics and goods from Asia to Europe by ship results in less emissions than trucking from a manufacturing partner in Portugal or Poland would.

The ‘last mile’ from our warehouse in Innsbruck, Austria (where one of QWSTION’s Co-Founders is based) to our retail partners’ or your door, is currently organised by our logistics partner FedEx. As deliveries are pooled, depending on where you live, the route may not be the most direct - but we are regularly evaluating new options to find the most sustainable solutions.

To our current knowledge ‘Cradle to Cradle Certified’ offers the most holistic and purposeful criteria of any certification. Therefore it was our obvious choice to pursue, and our first step was completed in December 2021 by achieving a Gold rating for our main material, Bananatex.

With our other textiles, GOTS and OekoTex certificates validate our efforts to use materials that are created responsibly and healthy.

But most importantly: we know all our partners personally and have set ourselves clear standards and goals based on mutual respect and responsibility, outlined by our code of conduct.

Cradle to Cradle describes products that are designed for circularity, with the goal of zero waste. It’s inspired by natural ecosystems, where any material is a nutrient – and is an alternative to the usual take-make-use-dispose approach which begins with raw materials mined from earth and ends with piles of garbage.

The term was coined by Michael Braungart and William McDonough in their eponymous book, and the certification was developed to approve goods made according to circular principles. Cradle to Cradle Certified® is currently the most holistic and thorough sustainability certification we know – which made it the logical choice to pursue for us. Our Bananatex® material has achieved a ‘Gold’ rating. 

Our team is here for you via wecare@qwstion.com. Due to structural internal changes, answering questions may currently take a little longer. We thank you for understanding.

Yes – please find the QWSTION store and a list of retail partners here.

Gift cards are redeemable through www.qwstion.comor in our store. If your purchase exceeds the value of the gift card, the remainder can be submitted using our standard payment options. Valid for 5 years from the date of purchase.

Subject to our Returns Policy, once an item has been returned, your refund will be credited to a new gift card.

Most goods today have no end-of-life solution – at some point they become waste. Designing for circularity means eliminating waste by keeping materials or nutrients in cycles.

To guide us towards circularity, we have created the CIRCLE-Strategy - based on the ‘Cradle to Cradle’ principles, described in the eponymous book by Michael Braungart and William McDonough. We question how things are designed, made and used to find better ways that benefit both humans and nature - ways in which waste and pollution are eliminated.

Have a look at how we implemented the circular design approach in our BioLight collection: Breaking down the bag

Nothing actually lasts forever (including us humans…). The natural world works in cycles and knows no waste – timeframes vary, but things grow and decompose again. So the important question for future generations is: will a product cause harm, once it’s reached the end of its life? Can it decompose, or be fully recycled? Using healthy and renewable resources allows us to create products that last long enough, yet will leave no (toxic) trace.

In agricultural terms permaculture is the opposite of monoculture and can be understood as a natural, self-sufficient andsustainable ecosystem. Permaculture is based on regeneration, diversity, resilience and natural productivity.

The Abacá banana trees, whose fibres we use to make our Bananatex® material, grow in a natural ecosystem of sustainable mixed agriculture and forestry, requiring no pesticides or extra water. Its fast growth and high resilience have made it an important contributor to reforestation in areas of former Philippine jungle eroded by soil damage due to monocultural palm plantations.

Regenerative agriculture is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to food and farming systems, as a path to permaculture. It focuses on topsoil regeneration, increasing biodiversity, improving the water cycle, supporting the sequestration of CO2, and thus increasing resilience to climate change.

Most plans to mitigate climate change focus on "reducing greenhouse gas emissions." Regenerative agriculture captures atmospheric carbon dioxide by growing plants that move that carbon dioxide into the soil. It is currently the only functioning technology available at scale for sequestering carbon that is already in the atmosphere.

For our goods it means that none of the materials and components used contain any harmful plastic. Our Roll Pack for example is made mainly from our 100% natural Bananatex® with a natural wax coating and a 100% wool felt protective compartment, the handle is made from vegetable tanned leather, the zippers consist of 100% cotton tapes with metal teeth, the buckles and rivets are made of aluminum alloy and the sewing thread of FSC-certified wood pulp (better know as Tencel®). Even the care labels on the inside of the bag are made from natural fibres.

Generally we’ve reduced the amount of plastic in our entire company to less then 1% of all materials used – most of our new products, our shipping boxes and also the interiors of our stores are plastic free. The protective packaging for shipping made from Tyvek® is the only major element we have not find a plastic-free solution for, yet (but we’re working on it…).