As Easy As Buying New: How Coblr Is Wiring Up Repair's Missing Infrastructure

Emily Watts has been frustrated by repair for years, most memorably when she took her own engagement ring in to be fixed. It was hard to find someone in the first place, and once she had, the process was entirely manual: a handwritten paper ticket, then no real sense of when she'd get it back. Stressful, given the value at stake, and just enough hassle in general that most of us give up and buy something new instead.

That's the problem Coblr exists to solve, and it's why Emily founded the company and now runs it as CEO. On this episode of HappyPorch Radio, part of a season asking where technology actually meets the messy reality of how people and organisations work, she talks to Barry about building the digital infrastructure that repair has simply never had.

A mail-in repair business as market research

Emily didn't start out in repair. She spent years in corporate operations at Fortune 50 companies, then became COO of Sling, a scheduling platform for shift workers, which was later acquired by Toast. It was while she was still at Toast, thinking about what might come next, that she decided to properly dig into the pain point she'd been carrying around for years.

So she started her own mail-in repair business. She wasn't doing the repairs herself, instead she worked with a repair artisan in Boston. She ran the operation for two years, in an effort to understand the perspective of both repair providers and consumers, bringing on a few early brand partners along the way too. "In addition to running the business and eating the dog food, as they say, we also did a bunch of market research and talked to hundreds of repair providers and brands," she told Barry. "What we found is that you look across the entire market and there is no infrastructure that connects and powers repair end to end."

The scale of that gap surprised her. Repair artisans were often working on software built back in the early 2000s, not even cloud-based, or making do with generalist tools that were never designed for their needs. Brands, meanwhile, were mostly running repair by hand, and that was true from small boutique labels right up to multi million dollar  fashion houses. What had started out feeling like a side project, almost a research exercise before the "real" business, turned out to be pointing at something far bigger. That's where Coblr came from.

Two sides of the same gap

Coblr started with repair providers, on the logic that you can't build a repair programme without the people who actually do the work. Its software runs their business end to end and takes on the admin that eats their time, customer communications and follow up especially, which Emily says takes a minimum of eight hours a week for a typical provider. As more repair businesses come onto the platform, Coblr also builds up a live picture of who has capacity, who turns work around fastest, and who's meeting the mark on quality, which is what lets it route each job to the nearest and best-placed provider.

On the brand side, the pitch is different, but it comes from the same place. Most brands that already offer some kind of repair do it manually, and the customer ends up carrying most of the burden themselves, hunting down a preferred partner or posting something off and hoping for the best. Emily sees that as value left on the table, given how much repair can do for loyalty and lifetime customer value. 

So Coblr embeds itself wherever the intent to repair is highest for a given brand. Often that's the customer service team, so an agent can place an order on a customer's behalf rather than just pointing them elsewhere. Sometimes it's retail, where a repair can be the reason someone walks back into a physical store. And there's a returns angle too: a network of providers can fix up damaged returns so they become viable resale stock instead of being written off entirely.

Technology isn't magic, on its own 

It's a lovely, small illustration of the season's whole theme. "I think repair, even if you have technology behind it, or the post-purchase experience, it's an experience," Emily said. "It's something where humans are involved, and if it's done well, it has huge impact for the brand and the consumer. Our whole goal is just making it easy, and embedded at any point in the experience where there is intent to repair from a consumer."

You can see that thinking in the small, deliberate touches: a text confirmation the moment an order goes in, automated status updates as the repair moves along, which Emily likens to a Domino's Pizza Tracker, and a two-way SMS feature in the works so a provider can flag a complication directly with the customer rather than leaving them guessing. 

That matters more than it might sound, because repair, unlike a straightforward delivery, doesn't always go to plan. An estimated completion date set from an initial photo can turn out to be wrong once an artisan actually opens the item up and sees the real damage. Historically, Emily said, that kind of update often didn't get communicated at all, not until the original deadline had passed and the customer came looking for it themselves.

Barry picked up on this as the real point behind the season's subtitle. Coblr didn't just build an app. Building the right tool meant properly understanding where it needed to sit, inside customer service teams, on shop floors, and across brands' existing workflows. That understanding, he suggested, is what actually ends up in the code.

Every item's a snowflake, until the data catches up

One of the areas this understanding comes from is in addressing what Barry called the "one of one" problem. Linear retail can run the same process across millions of identical units. Repair can't. Every item arrives with its own damage, its own materials, its own history, which usually means every job needs its own bespoke judgement.

"I think it does add complexity," Emily said, "but I think it's also a really beautiful reason for technology. Every item is unique, is a snowflake. But with data, there's a certain amount of standardisation you can do for the process." That standardisation is further helped by Sal, Coblr's AI diagnostic tool, currently in alpha. 

With apparel, most of us can self-diagnose the problem well enough: It needs hemming, there's a hole. Footwear and handbags are trickier. Sal lets a consumer, a retail associate or a customer service agent upload a couple of photos and a short description, and it uses computer vision to work out what's wrong and put a rough cost against it. "That helps us learn each item and be able to better predict how long something will take, how much it will cost," Emily explained, "so that something where there was no detail, now there's at least guardrails." It’s not perfect, there may well be deeper details to tend to when the pro gets a look at it, but getting a general sense beforehand is helpful and reassuring to customers. 

Software gets cheap. Understanding doesn't.

The other thread Barry pulled on links this conversation back to an earlier episode with Chris Lucas of Secondsense: as AI makes software faster and cheaper to build, whatever AI can't replicate is where the real value ends up sitting. Emily calls it, borrowing the industry's own slightly doom-laden shorthand, the "SaaSpocalypse". Her answer to it isn't the software itself, it's everything underneath: years of accumulated understanding of the repair sector, proprietary data on repair time, cost, difficulty and geographic patterns built up from working with hundreds of repair businesses, and a vetted provider network that simply can't be spun up overnight.

Being that deeply woven into the actual workflows repair businesses run on, she suggested, isn't something a model can shortcut its way to.

The commercial case grows out of the same idea. For brands, Coblr can offer SKU-level data on what's being repaired and where, feeding straight back into product development, alongside the more straightforward win of recovering value from damaged goods rather than writing them off. Emily noted that in the US specifically, damaged items with real resale value are still often sent to landfill or destroyed rather than repaired and resold, though she was quick to add that's no longer the case across the EU, at least legislatively. 

For repair providers, the pitch is consolidation: one purpose-built system instead of five or ten stitched-together tools, and a genuine shot at the steady, consistent workload that lets a small repair business actually grow rather than just get through its seasonal peaks. Providers accepted into Coblr's network, Emily said, are currently earning around 20% more a month than they were before, and several have taken on extra staff as a result.

There's more coming for Coblr, too. Emily mentioned new brand partnerships and further build-out of the infrastructure connecting providers and brands, though she was upfront that she couldn't get into specifics while it's still under wraps, laughingly admitting that's "kind of a cop-out of a response". Fair enough. There's evidently plenty still to come.

It's exactly the kind of challenge we love hearing about at HappyPorch: building the infrastructure that connects the different sides of a circular economy business, providers, brands and consumers, grounded in real domain understanding rather than software for its own sake. If you're working on something with that same shape, we'd love to talk.

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You can find Coblr at coblros.com, or connect with Emily Watts and Coblr on LinkedIn and Instagram. Listen to the full conversation with Emily on HappyPorch Radio, wherever you get your podcasts.