Copyright © 2026 OyList. All Rights Reserved.
Share
Items12
1
John Timpson (businessman)
Born
The best British example of repair as a proper business. John Timpson led a buyback of the family firm in 1983, sold off its shoe shops a few years later and bet the company on cobbling, key cutting, then watch, phone and jewellery repair in small kiosks. Branch staff are trusted to price and fix customers' complaints themselves, and the firm is known for hiring people leaving prison. His son James ran it day to day from 2002 until he became a government minister in 2024.
More about John Timpson (businessman)2
Tom Farmer
Born
Farmer opened the first Kwik-Fit in Edinburgh in 1971 on a simple promise: drive in without an appointment and have exhausts, tyres and brakes sorted while you wait, at a fixed price. Standardising the most common car repairs into a fast, branded service turned a messy local trade into a national chain, and Ford bought it for around a billion pounds in 1999. He died in 2025, and the drive-in fast-fit format he popularised is still how many British drivers get the basics fixed.
More about Tom Farmer3
Kyle Wiens
Wiens and Luke Soules started iFixit as university students after failing to find a manual for a broken laptop. The guides are free and written partly by volunteers; the money comes from selling the parts and tool kits those guides call for, a neat model where the content creates the sale. Teardowns of new gadgets brought publicity, and official parts deals with makers such as Google, Samsung and Motorola show manufacturers coming round. Wiens has also become one of the loudest right-to-repair campaigners.
More about Kyle Wiens4
Bas van Abel
Born
Van Abel set up Fairphone in Amsterdam in 2013, first as a campaign about conflict minerals, then as a company selling phones built to be opened with an ordinary screwdriver. Batteries, screens and cameras are sold as spare parts, and later models come with long software support, which is the commercial point: a phone you keep for years. It sells in modest numbers next to the giants and has had lean years, but it has kept shipping new models. He has handed the chief executive's job to others and remains on the board.
More about Bas van Abel5
Yvon Chouinard
Born
Patagonia has repaired its customers' clothing for decades, and under Chouinard's ownership it turned that into Worn Wear: a large repair facility in Reno, Nevada, a mobile repair tour and a programme that takes back used gear for trade-in credit and resells it. The practical lesson is that repair works best when it is built into how products are designed and guaranteed. Since 2022 the company has been owned by a trust and a non-profit set up by Chouinard and his family.
More about Yvon Chouinard6
Craig Newmark
Born
Craigslist began in 1995 as Newmark's email list of events in San Francisco and became the place Americans sold their sofas, bikes and cars to each other. The model is unusually lean: most listings are free, money comes from fees on job ads and a few other categories, and the site has barely changed its plain design. It shows that a reuse marketplace does not need slick software, only enough local buyers and sellers in one place.
More about Craig Newmark7
Pierre Omidyar
Born
Omidyar wrote AuctionWeb over a long weekend in 1995, and the first item sold was a broken laser pointer, bought by a collector of broken laser pointers. That story captures the point: someone will want almost anything if the market is big enough. Feedback ratings let strangers trust each other, and listing and final value fees made the secondhand trade profitable at scale. Jeff Skoll and later Meg Whitman did much of the work of building eBay into a company.
More about Pierre Omidyar8
Shintaro Yamada (businessman)
Yamada founded Mercari in 2013 as a phone-first flea market at a time when Japanese secondhand selling meant auction sites on a computer. Photograph an item, list it in a minute, ship it through convenience stores with anonymous delivery: that ease made casual reselling normal in Japan, where the business has long been profitable. The American arm has been a harder slog, which is a useful caution about exporting a marketplace. He remains chief executive and the largest shareholder.
More about Shintaro Yamada (businessman)9
Julie Wainwright
Wainwright founded The RealReal in 2011 after her earlier company, Pets.com, became the emblem of the dot-com crash. Her answer to the problem that buyers do not trust secondhand luxury was to take goods on consignment and authenticate them in-house, which made expensive bags and watches resellable online. The cost of all that handling has kept profits elusive for long stretches, and she stepped down as chief executive in 2022, but the model of trusted, authenticated resale is now widely copied.
More about Julie Wainwright10
Eileen Fisher
Eileen Fisher's clothing company started a take-back programme in 2009, buying back its own used garments for store credit, cleaning and reselling the good ones and turning damaged pieces into new designs. That works for her because the clothes are simple, durable and recognisable, so a used piece still has value. It is a small part of the business, but a rare case of a brand running its own resale at scale for well over a decade. Employees own a large share of the company through a stock ownership plan.
More about Eileen Fisher11
Jennifer Hyman
Hyman and Jenny Fleiss founded Rent the Runway in 2009 to rent designer dresses for a night, then added subscriptions so customers could swap clothes every month. The hard part was operational: cleaning, repairing and shipping each garment many times, which the company built warehouses and dry-cleaning lines to handle. It went public in 2021 and has struggled for profits, and Hyman stepped down as chief executive in May 2026, so this is the cautionary entry about how costly reuse can be.
More about Jennifer Hyman12
Tom Szaky
Born
Szaky dropped out of Princeton to sell worm-cast fertiliser bottled in used soft-drink bottles, and TerraCycle grew from there into a business that brands pay to collect packaging nobody else will recycle. In 2019 he launched Loop, which sells everyday products in durable containers that are collected, cleaned and refilled. Some retail trials ended early, which shows how hard reuse logistics are, but the paid collection model is the part that has kept the company going for over two decades.
More about Tom Szaky
