Repareer.com & Reparatiestichting
A platform and a foundation that make repairing a broken product as easy as replacing it.
- Year
- 2014 – 2020
- Role
- Co-founder, design & development
- Client
- Own venture, with Thijs Schippers
- Outcome
- National press · SIRE campaign partner
- 2014
- co-founded with Thijs Schippers
- 3
- versions of the platform
Featured in
In 2014, Thijs Schippers and I were thinking out loud. So much gets thrown away because of a small fault, while plenty of people would love a repair project: a part-time mechanic, a computer science student, a retired seamstress. Repareer.com connects people with broken products to skilled neighbours, for a cheap, social and sustainable repair.
After almost a year of building it in the evenings, next to our studies, the site went live. For the launch we made a short animated film explaining what Repareer.com is all about.
Learning by doing
The launch got a lot of attention: De Telegraaf, AD, Flow magazine, and a radio interview on NPO 2. Thijs and I were even invited to lunch with Prime Minister Mark Rutte at the Catshuis. But posting a broken product didn’t automatically make helpful neighbours appear. Matching supply and demand turned out to be the hard part.
So we iterated. In 2016 we focused on Amsterdam only. Het Parool featured us and products really got repaired, but interest from the rest of the country kept growing. The version after that lists repair options by keyword instead, including professional repair shops and Repair Cafés, so nobody posts a product and hears nothing back.
Reparatiestichting
To continue the mission, we set up the Dutch Repair Foundation, Reparatiestichting, and built a new web app for the platform. In 2019 the SIRE foundation asked us to support its national campaign #WaardeerHetRepareerHet with data and insights from the platform.
