Circular Tech Map Category Spotlight: Repair

The Circular Tech Map is our attempt to keep track of the digital tools helping the circular economy actually work: who's building what, and where. It's grown into a fairly large directory, which is brilliant, but it also means it's easy to land on the map and not quite know where to start looking.

So to help you get your bearings, we’re starting to put together category pages. For this first one we took a slice of the map and asked a simple question: what's actually going on here? Not a comparison, not a review, just a look at what we're seeing across the companies working in that space, how they're going about it, and where in the world they're based.

Repair felt like the right place to begin. It's one of the oldest circular strategies there is, and also one of the hardest to scale. While fixing something well takes skill, parts, time and often a person standing in front of the item, it takes a digital layer to make that fixing possible at scale: the booking systems, the digital passports, the workflow software, the knowledge bases.That’s what you’ll see under Repair on the Circular Tech Map. 

Broadly, the resources split into two camps:

The first repairs things directly, or puts you in touch with someone who will. 

Think consumer-facing services: book a repair, send your item off, get it back mended. Sojo, The Seam, Menddie and Mendit all work this way, connecting customers to networks of tailors and menders. Loom does something similar with a slight twist: you upload a photo, get proposals back from designers and makers, and choose how your item gets transformed rather than just fixed.

Then there's Fxry, which mixes mail-in repair with local pickup and in-studio visits depending on where you are in the US, and Berghaus Repair, a brand running its own in-house repair service rather than partnering with a platform. Its Sunderland-based team fixes zips, re-tapes seams and stitches up wear and tear on Berghaus gear directly.

The second camp doesn't repair anything itself. 

It builds the software that other people use to run repair operations. Fixably and fixfirst both provide the operating systems that repair shops, brands and manufacturers use to manage bookings, diagnostics and workflow. Syncron does something similar at a bigger scale, helping manufacturers manage service and repair across entire product lifecycles. Boomerang, Prolong, Iqutech and Circulo all sit in the logistics side of this, coordinating the collection, tracking and return of items that need fixing.

Digital passports and product IDs

A good number of companies here, including Arianee, Eon, Certilogo, Laybl, Madeby, Unum Solum, PlsReturnIt and Acctivate, are building ways to attach a digital identity to a physical product. Once an item has that kind of ID, whether through a QR code, NFC tag or blockchain record, a brand can track its whole life: where it's been, whether it's genuine, and what's been repaired or replaced along the way.

Repair often isn't the whole point of these tools. It tends to sit alongside resale, authentication and take-back as one of several services a passport can unlock. But it's a meaningful piece of circular infrastructure, because knowing a product's history is often what makes repairing it (rather than replacing it) the sensible choice.

Knowledge, data and the case for repair

Then there’s a group that sits somewhere in between: rather than running or enabling repairs, they build the case for repair or the knowledge needed to do it. iFixit is the best known of these, with its enormous library of free repair guides and teardowns. RepairMonitor, run by the Repair Café International Foundation, gathers data from Repair Cafés worldwide on what gets fixed and what doesn't, building a picture of product durability that can inform manufacturers and policymakers. WRAP's Circular Design Toolkit takes yet another angle, helping fashion and textile teams design products that are easier to repair in the first place. GoodMine rounds this group out with a directory and chatbot that points people towards repairers, resellers and recyclers depending on what they need.

Where they're based

This is a mostly European and North American picture. The UK leads with eleven companies, more than a third of the category, including The Seam, Sojo, Loom, Save Your Wardrobe and WRAP. The US follows with eight, among them iFixit, Fxry and COBLR. France has a cluster of four, all working in digital passports and logistics: Arianee, Boomerang, Prolong and Unum Solum.

Beyond that, it's a scattering: Finland (Fixably, Menddie), Norway (Whee), the Netherlands (RepairMonitor), Ireland (Iqutech), Germany (fixfirst), Italy (Certilogo) and Sweden (Syncron) each have one. It's a category with reach well beyond any single hub, even if the concentration in the UK and US is clear.

A fashion-heavy category, with a few exceptions

Look closely and this category is dominated by fashion and textiles: repairing clothes, shoes and bags accounts for the large majority of what's listed. That's not surprising given how visible textile waste has become and how well-suited garment repair is to a marketplace model.

The exceptions are worth noting, though. iFixit and Fixably both work in electronics repair. Whee offers a subscription service for electric cargo bikes in Oslo, bundling maintenance into the deal, making for a superior experience to owning. Acctivate and Boomerang serve industrial and manufacturing clients. And several of the software platforms, Worksmith, fixfirst, Iqutech, RepairMonitor and Syncron among them, are built to work across any sector rather than being tied to fashion at all.

Explore further

That's the shape of Repair as we see it today: a category built less on the physical act of fixing and more on the digital scaffolding that makes fixing easier, more traceable and more likely to happen in the first place. Take a look through the map for your work, your research, or your curiosity.