It might surprise you to know that becoming a sustainability warrior doesn't necessarily take a calling. Sometimes, it just needs to start as a hobby that you can share with someone you love. That's how Retrospekt, a Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based technology refurbishment firm got its start – and how, somewhat improbably, I'm now playing with what is essentially a 35-year-old Game Boy that looks as if it was made yesterday.
"It's actually quite fun being able to stay in the midwest and bring something unique to the midwest," Retrospekt co-owner and CEO Adam Fuerst told me during a lengthy conversation, adding that partner and licensee companies are often surprised at their location.
This article is part of a series of sustainability-themed content we're running to observe Earth Day and promote more sustainable practices. Check out all of our Sustainability Week 2024 content.
Dressed in an open plaid shirt and white T-shirt, Fuerst, 37, described the unassuming nearly decade-old beginnings of a company that would go on to recover, refurbish, and resell everything from aging Game Boys and 4th-gen iPods to Polaroid cameras and Sony Walkman cassette players.
Fuerst didn't really plan the business. While attending grad school with his then-girlfriend, now wife and company co-owner Kori Fuerst in Wisconsin, they started refurbishing old and discarded tech as a hobby. They kept doing it until opportunity came knocking in the form of the Impossible Film brand (since rebranded Impossible Polaroid), which was desperately looking for more Polaroid cameras to support its burgeoning retro-instant film business.
"We were broke college students and we figured, you know, you can't get much more broke than we already are. So why not give it a try?" said Fuerst.
What's arisen, without much of a plan, is not so much a reclamation factory but a workshop of 40 or so people, who reclaim hundreds of products a month across a handful of selected core categories (the company also produces a small selection of new, retro-style products). That selection process, by the way, is fairly specific.
"For us, we're looking at products that were mass-produced, repairable, and have a cultural significance," explained Fuerst.
Naturally, the Game Boy, which by some estimates sold 120 million units, remains beloved to this day, and is celebrating its 35th anniversary on April 21, fulfills that criterion, as does the Polaroid Cameras (300 million units sold), and Sony Walkman (400 million).
Each of these products requires technical expertise, attention to detail, and often, a specific approach to bringing them back to life.
Whereas Polaroid cameras use film cassettes that include the batteries, Game Boys use a few AA batteries that, when they arrive at Retrospekt, have often leaked and corroded the Game Boy's interiors.
Refurbishing consumer electronics is about as difficult as you might expect. In addition to cleaning out the corrosion, Retrospekt might replace the housing. Fuerst told me that the company has what he calls 'New Old' sources, places that keep stocks of original product components, like Game Boy chassis and buttons, and those are often things the company does replace.
"But the brains of the units, we keep original. So we're not like remaking the dot matrix screen for [the Gameboy]," he said.
The refurb team dissembles the products, bench-tests everything, and repairs them at a component level. They can, when necessary, even create replacement components, often by scavenging other refurbishment stock.
"Most of the parts that we produce are from taking 10 units and making six units from them, and then you get donor parts from the other four, for example," Fuerst added. It's a"nothing goes to waste" mentality that fits with Retrospekt's larger purpose.
"What our value is to the community is not just to go and source working units and resell them, but it's really to get the stuff that's destined for landfill and that no one wants and is just quite frankly garbage without someone doing this labor of love on each unit," Fuerst explains.
Retrospket applies the same care to other product categories. For a recent Polaroid 600 Barbie-themed camera, the company used all original internals and created new pink outer shells.
It puts considerable effort into restoring the Sony Walkman cassette players, something that's made doubly hard by the fact that the original belts that drive the tape spools are all 30 years old and deteriorating. "Our team has worked really hard to source replacement motors for a lot of these units, and really dials these in at such a precise level of function," said Fuerst. "It's something I'm really proud of, and something we do in the hundreds of each month."
Other refurb products in high demand include those iPods. I asked about the original iPod, but the company can't find enough replacement parts. And without source parts, Retrospekt might be building something that diverges from the original product experience.
"We want whatever leaves here to just look like a million bucks and to look as closely as it did to the original," Fuerst explained. "If we can't get replacement screens or replacement housings for some of these things that we're trying to do in a large volume, it's really hard to scale, especially something that is used and abused so much, like an iPod."
He told me the company is fulfilling a desire to "experience retro stuff. They [customers] don't want a pale imitation of the 80s. They want the 80s or they want the 90s. They don't want a replica of it. They want the real thing."
Anecdotally, the pair of Game Boys Retrospekt sent me, one from 1989 and the other a Game Boy Color from 1998, are indistinguishable from the originals, right down to the pair of Tetris games the company included. Those too, it turns out, are reclamations.
"We take them apart. We replace the battery cells inside if they have a battery cell so that you can save them," Fuerst said. "We reset them, we clean all the contacts inside as well, so you have a great contact when you go to use it."
For the amount of work and detail Retrospket puts into everything it does, the prices for these refurbed gadgets are not as high as you might expect. The Game Boys sell for around $150 a piece, and the games are $29 a piece.
Affordability, like everything else Retrospekt does, is no accident. "I mean they're not cheap, but for the amount of time and attention to detail that goes into each one of these units, it's fairly affordable. That can only happen when you can get the units at a real low-low price," Fuerst explained.
As for where Retrospekt sources its gadgets, the purchasing team has what Fuerst called a variety of traditional online sources but added that "there's people that come directly to us and they'll say, ‘I run an e-waste facility, and I see these come in.’ We have people that just know about us, and they reach us and say, ‘Hey, I have one of these, it’s corroded, do you want it?’ or ‘will you give me anything for it?’"
Thanks to the popularity of gadgets like the Game Boy and micro-cassette players there's a steady supply of unused, disused, and discarded gadgetry out there.
It's also worth noting that Retrospekt doesn't try to use refurbishment or reclaimed technology as an excuse for not standing behind the products, Each one has a 14-day money-back guarantee and a three-month warranty, though even there Retrospekt can be flexible.
"We have people that, unfortunately, they forget that everything's not built like a cell phone anymore. So you get a lot of people that just throw their Walkman onto their bed and then it falls off their bed out to their floor and breaks." In those cases, if the product is out of warranty, Retrospekt may offer a healthy discount on a replacement unit.
"Ultimately, want to make sure that these are continuing to exist in the world and that people are using them, and they're not just storing them in a cupboard somewhere," said Fuerst.
I was curious to know if Retrospket had considered reclaiming the original iPhone, but Fuerst dismissed the idea because he isn't sure what people would do with it. There's no updated iOS to run on it, and most of the apps will no longer work; Retrospekt is refurbishing for use, not polishing up museum pieces. One phone that Fuerst would like to see rise up from the trash heap, though, is the original Motorola Razr, which he described as "the best phone ever produced."
"I'm just waiting for Gen Alpha to discover Razr phones and just take it to the next level and just unplug. I can't wait, I just, I think for everything there's a counterbalance, and I think it's coming for us and I can't wait for it."
In some ways Rertospekt is a counterbalance to our decades of unbridled consumerism. We bought, used, loved, and then discarded millions of gadgets, and now Retrospekt is here to, in its way, tip the balance back just a bit, and keep some of those products out of landfills, at least for now.
@techradar ♬ Stories 2 - Danilo Stankovic
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