Our story
Team Repair was founded by a team of design engineers from Imperial College London. We are on a mission to increase STEM uptake and tackle the e-waste crisis, using the magic of repair.
As kids, we loved taking broken things apart, seeing how they worked, and trying to fix them. It was these hands-on experiences that made us want to be engineers when we grew up! We created Team Repair to share these experiences and show kids how fun science, tech, and engineering can be.
Team Repair was a post-it note idea. We were all engineers who cared about reducing e-waste. The first bit of research we did was on a Reddit forum. We posted the question "Why do you think we don't repair things like our grandparents did?", and to our surprise, we received hundreds of responses. The common answer - people don't have the confidence to give repair a go. That's when Oscar said - "Why don't we just send broken toys to kids", and that is how Team Repair was born.
Our advice
After coming up with the idea, we were already testing our first prototype a few days later with our lecturer's children. Very early in our journey, we started working with the East London Waste Authority to run repair workshops in their repair cafe's to promote a younger audience to their events. These were successful and gave us our first revenue.
As a social impact business, we made use of grant and competition funding very early on. This enabled us to be able to get the point of launching without needing to raise investment. If we were to go back now, I don't think we'd change anything. We've learnt from every mistake and changed strategy as soon as we've disproved assumptions.
Our metrics
We've inspired over 4000 children so far, with significant results: 54% reported increased confidence in repair; 26% showed increased interest in STEM careers; 16% developed an interest in jobs that benefit the planet.
