Items12The creator’s order
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John Timpson (businessman)Born 24 Mar 1943The 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…0i - 2
Tom FarmerBorn 10 Jul 1940Farmer 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…0i - 3
Kyle WiensWiens 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.…0 - 4
Bas van AbelBorn 18 Aug 1977Van 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…0i - 5
Yvon ChouinardBorn 9 Nov 1938Patagonia 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…0i - 6
Craig NewmarkBorn 6 Dec 1952Craigslist 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…0i - 7
Pierre OmidyarBorn 21 Jun 1967Omidyar 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,…0i - 8
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…0i - 9
Julie WainwrightWainwright 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…0 - 10
Eileen FisherEileen 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…0
