Launched in 2018, FixIts was founded to empower people to repair their everyday items, giving them a new lease on life instead of being thrown away. We are seeing a change in the consumer mindset from buying new to repairing and reusing. Now more than ever we need to encourage this change. FixIts is designed and manufactured in the UK, made from an eco-friendly bioplastic (compliant to EU regulation EN-14995) that makes them an endlessly reusable, fast, non-toxic solution for repairing broken products.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
The idea was formed when the main founder Chris Lefteri was writing his first book on Materials. One of the materials Chris discovered started being used by his wife at home to fix things, at which point Chris knew that this material had the potential to be in everyone’s home. It was 10 years later that I (a former student of Chris’), started working on this idea with him. About 6 months later we had the beginnings of a product that everyone could use to fix things with.
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What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?
Don’t be afraid of failing because along the journey of being an entrepreneur it’s going to happen a lot, and from those failures you’re going to learn so much more than from your successes. As part of that being prepared to fail, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
It’s not necessary to spend lots of money, start small and test before investing in things that can scale. Focus on the creative and communication side to engage with customers, showing “why they need this” is more important than “it’s cheap”. If you aren’t able to get them to buy into the brand/product then the price is not the issue. Fix the communication first, then worry about the price later.
What can we hope to see from FixIts in the future?
We want to build the FixIts brand in such a way that it breaks down that intimidating barrier between a broken product and a repaired one. Building a community of fixers, collaborating with businesses that have similar goals, removing the stigma of “used” products and expanding our product range to include additional material to repair with; these are part of our company goals.
In the short term you’ll see us working with UK companies to reduce the environmental impact of our entire supply chain as we begin to scale the business beyond just our website.
