Introduction
Continuing our mission of stimulating product-repairs. Thijs Schippers and I co-founded the 'Dutch Repair Foundation' or 'Reparatiestichting'. Aiming to make the process of repairing a product as easy as the process of replacing a product. We also built a new web-app for our Repareer.com platform.
Learning by doing
While running the platform Repareer.com we learned valuable lessons about bringing people together and about how people deal with broken products. With these lessons we built several variants of the web-based application.
Nation-wide (2014)
The first version has teached us that letting users post their broken products does not automatically mean that 'skilled neighbours' appear to lend a hand. While we had a lot of media attention, the way of working was not sustainable in the end - as matching supply and demand of repairing skills proved hard.
Only Amsterdam (2016)
To better match supply and demand, we chose the second version to only work for Amsterdam-based users. This time we got featured in Het Parool and products actually got repaired, but interest from other parts of the country kept growing.
Current version
For the current version, we optimized the customer journey. For a fair percentage of users, Repareer.com was a bad experience because they would spend time to post a broken product to the platform and were not contacted by a local person. To prevent this issue from happening again, we made a conceptual change: listing repairing options based on keywords - including widely available professional repairing businesses and Repair Cafés.
SIRE Campaign
In 2019 we were approached by the Dutch foundation SIRE (Stichting Ideële Reclame) to be a part of their awareness campaign called #WaardeerHetRepareerHet. We helped the campaign by providing the data and insights that we got from our Repareer.com platform.
