WiGoMan Blog - Tech Care (Repair, Reuse, Recycle) Industry Leader

It has been awhile since I have had a chance to share my musings with the world about the tech repair industry. While 2020 has been a decade of a year, your friend, the WiGoMan has been busy diving deeper into the tech repair industry. In fact -- or just to sound dramatic - deeper than any human before him.  Now I stand at a crossroads. A year after joining repair.org fulltime, I am leaving the association --  but more on that at a later date -- because now I want to jump into things a little bit and talk to you about the tech repair industry. What it is exactly and why I think NOW MORE THAN EVER the industry is poised  to grow into a powerful, profitable industry. Let me share a few things that I have learned over the last year at repair.org and 14 years in the tech repair industry. First up, WHY THE HECK DO YOU KEEP CALLING IT THE "TECH REPAIR INDUSTRY" WiGoMan? What was originally called the "Cellphone repair industry" has evolved greatly and continues to evolve ...

When I was a kid my Dad taught me how to fix things. We fixed things around the house, we fixed the car, we fixed the roof ( in the middle of a very hot summer ), we fixed the lawnmower but when the TV broke we both carried it down to the car and took it to a local repair shop. Repair was in our blood but when it was above our pay grade we took it to a repair shop for a professional to work on. Boy howdy did I love to tinker with things when I was a kid! Radios, tape decks, boomboxes and anything that had screws to be unscrewed. One time my parents bought me a brand new ten-speed bike, which I promptly took apart and repainted. Repair was in my blood! Our family was a typical middle class family in America enjoying what life offered us but respecting the fact that we needed to take care of the things we owned. Money was something we didn't just throw around. When my Mom wanted new chairs for the dinning room because they were wobbly and worn out. Dad broke out the woo...

The TECH REPAIR INDUSTRY is huge! I mean really, really big. Billions of dollars in revenue flow thru thousands of tech repair shops and independent tech repair people all over the country. But MOST people don't even know that tech repair is a thing! Sad 😞but true! You see, when my company started repairing cell phones as part of our AT&T retail business in 2006 every single customer would say, "I never knew anyone who fixed phones". Then w hen I opened my first standalone repair shop in 2010 almost everyone who came into our shop would say, "I never knew anyone who fixed phones". Well of course, that made sense, because we were one of the first companies to offer on the spot immediate cell phone repair in the country. The thing that really surprised  me was that for  ten years  we still had a lot of people coming in and saying the same thing!? INDEPENDENT RESEARCH Before I sold my repair business in 2016 I decided to do some research. I went ou...

Wow! In the last three years the TECH repair industry has seen some pretty big dominoes fall and I predict that 2020 will be a breakout year for this rapidly growing multi-billion dollar industry. Dominoes started falling back in mid-August 2016 when a company most people had never heard of managed to pull down $15 million in series A funding, led by Carmel Ventures, with Sequoia Capital (a pretty serious name in investing) also participating - after seeding CellSavers with $3 million in December 2015. An $18 million invest in a less than one year old company kind of said something about the tech repair industry don't ya think?? Down went a domino. August 22, 2016 | Israeli startup  CellSavers , which provides an on-demand repair platform for smartphones and other mobile devices, has completed a $15 million financing round, led by Carmel Ventures, with participation of Sequoia Capital Israel. The current funding follows the company’s $3 million rou...