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In recent decades, consumer culture has turned the mobile phone into a marketplace icon. Despite consumers' fondness for the functionalities of these devices, mobile phones come at a considerable cost, leaving both ethical and environmental 'footprints'. This article discusses consumer's repair and maintenance practices of smartphones as outcomes of the constitutive contexts that ethical brands may provide. The objective is to provide a better explanation for the emergence of such practices around organizations. Social practice theory approaches to consumption often consider teleo-affective structures or engagements to be key in transforming bundles of practices and material arrangements of everyday life. The article traces the idea that branding transports affects as consumers appropriate their phones through performances of tinkering and fixing. Inspired by a consumer culture theory reading of social practices, this article conceptualizes brands as an organizational vehicle needed to transport affects. Seen as cultural systems, brands therefore carry the potential to leverage affects towards repair and maintenance practices. Focussing on the role that ethical branding can play in the creation of public encounters with concepts, practices and embodiments of sustainability, the paper presents findings from a netnography of a brand community. In doing so it highlights how brands persuade consumers to introduce bystanders to repair and maintenance practices of smartphones. This article claims that leveraging consumer engagement through ethical branding is a practical and effective way to promote sustainability. Further suggesting that brand sustainability imperatives translate into cultural conversations and political processes that help to imaginatively examine and reconfigure the intersectional challenges of sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]