FixIts was founded to help reduce waste by empowering consumers to repair broken products. To make repair fun, to make it easy, to save our customers money, time and help save the planet.
Taking products apart and seeing what they are made of, how they go together and then repairing them is one of the characteristics of our Founder Chris Lefteri. Reusing waste and parts of products that others have discarded to bring new value elsewhere is something that since a young boy has driven Chris. Waste not want not!
We’re trying to join in the fight against unnecessary waste and product obsolescence with products that can easily repaired when ordinary materials like tape and glue can’t. We want to grow a business that’s focused on accessibility and helping consumers to repair their stuff.
There used to be a time when repair was the norm, but since the invention of plastics in the 1950s we’ve been driven by convenience and cheap replaceable products. Products that were never designed to be responsibly recycled or disposed of.
These days convenience is the number 1 driver, our simple monkey brains want that dopamine hit more than being even slightly inconvenienced. We’re had adverts thrown at us from all directions for our whole lives, teaching us to buy this or that new thing; to upgrade and replace anything and everything.
You’d think that we’d have wised up to it by now, but the might of big industry is very good at making us spend our hard earned money on things we don’t need.
So why is it that we don’t repair things as the norm?
Arguably we live in an age where it should be easier than ever to learn how to repair anything that breaks in our homes. The gap between the expert and the novice is smaller than it’s ever been in human history; how?
The internet has created huge asymmetries between those who know and those who don’t. Almost any question is a couple google searches away from an answer, not to mention the sheer amount of tutorial videos on platforms like youtube. The collective knowledge of humanity is at our fingertips and yet we still opt to throw away and buy new just because of a single component failure.
For us, we want to build an approach within society that means you automatically look to repair rather than replace. What’s the worst that can happen by having a go at repairing something instead of binning it straight away?
As mentioned we’ve been conditioned to see new as the best and old as the worst. Companies have done a fantastic job as creating desire for objects that are only a little bit better than their predecessor (but our perception of that improvement is far grander than the reality).
We have to learn how to thrive in a world of excess, second, third, fourth hand stuff. We are sitting on literal treasure troves of value, but only if we put a little time and energy into that stuff.