Elevating the Repair Economy

Before Sarah Johnson, ’16, MBA ’22, returned to Stanford University to enroll in business school, she lived in Rwanda and Kenya developing solar home systems sold across Africa. Families would pay installments for whole solar packages—a refrigerator, smart phone, and light bulbs that all wired into a photovoltaic panel.

“It sounds cheesy, but these products really do change people’s lives,” she says.

Until the technology breaks.

“Families are reliant on these things for work and studies, but they’re also really expensive. And as a result, people use them for as long as they can.”

For many Kenyans, buying a brand-new phone might be one month’s income; a computer, three month’s income; and a solar home system could cost a whole year’s income. So, while in the United States, the consumer mindset is often to buy a new device when one breaks, in Kenya and most developing economies, the default is to repair it or to buy a used one. In fact, the East African nation is home to some 30,000 electronics repair shops. Yet because these shops vary widely in terms of customer service and quality, there was a clear opportunity to improve the market.

Johnson sensed a chance not just to fix broken screens, but the whole buyer experience.

At Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), she fanned that spark of an idea into Revivo, a marketplace for electronics spare parts and refurbished phones and laptops, starting in Kenya.

Building trust

“I am a doer at heart, so to be honest, I was a little torn about returning to school,” she says, but a series of campus programs propelled her forward.

In 2021, she won the GSB’s Impact Design Immersion Fellowship, an 8-week program that gave her funding to interview businesses, social enterprises, and nonprofits. Through her professional network in Kenya, Johnson recruited Ritah Wangila to help survey the business landscape; Wangila is still with the venture, now as a product manager.

“We went out and talked to hundreds of repair shops around Nairobi and close to a thousand electronics customers,” says Johnson.

Of those surveyed, 94 percent said they had experienced challenges getting repairs, from shoddy workmanship to deceptive shop owners—let alone the maze that is finding the right replacement part. When their device was broken, many had also tried buying used devices as a replacement, but didn’t trust the quality of the products they saw on the market.

“If you’re trying to get your Huawei Y6 phone fixed and the charging port’s not working, how do you find that one spare part out of 15,000 SKUs? How do you know you can trust the quality and origin of that product?”

Quality and trustworthiness would become the pillars of Revivo’s business model, from a 1-year warranty on all electronics sold to building out a network of trusted vendors.

Then in 2022, Johnson received an Innovation Transfer Grant from the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy.  The funding allowed Revivo to begin building out their marketplace and address the biggest need of the small repair businesses: access to quality and affordable spare parts. Soon, the online marketplace was connecting repair technicians with verified suppliers offering parts, refurbished devices, and accessories.

Revivo launched as a business-to-business company, intending to sell to repair technicians, but by popular demand it has broadened to sell directly to consumers, too, and added a marketplace for refurbished laptops, phones, and other electronics.

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without”

In an era of model upgrades and planned obsolescence, perhaps it comes as no surprise that electronic waste is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world.

In 2022, one study showed a 53 percent jump in greenhouse gas emissions from e-waste from 2014 to 2020. The researchers also noted that testing showed unhealthy levels of hazardous metals in the air, water, and soil within communities living near recycling centers for electronic waste.

Worse, in Kenya, only 10 percent of e-waste is properly recycled—and so these toxic metals are accumulating without oversight on roadsides and in waterways. By extending the useful life of electronic devices, Revivo is hoping to curb emissions associated with their manufacture—and the human health concerns from the e-waste itself.

“We’re really the inner loop of the circular economy,” Johnson says.

In a way, the math is maddeningly simple. If you double the life of a smart phone, you cut the carbon emissions per day of use in half. And the same principle holds true for e-waste.

The wider world

Revivo estimates the electronics repair and refurbishment market to be $1 billion in Kenya; across Africa, it’s $25.7 billion. From the outset, Johnson has seen the business prospects, and the climate imperative, as being far bigger than her startup in Nairobi.

“It is a problem that so many people all over the world can relate to. I talk to people in India, in Brazil, in Indonesia, and it resonates,” she says, seeing the potential for Revivo to expand into other African countries in the short term, and more globally in the longer term.

Down the line, she hopes nations like the United States will follow the lead of emerging markets and lean into the repair economy. To this end, she urges current Stanford students to think bigger than their campus home—and farther abroad.

“There’s so much potential here for climate solutions, yet at Stanford it’s easy to focus on Silicon Valley. The truth is climate change is a global problem and we need global solutions,” she says. “We have to expand all over the world and find solutions that match local community needs if we’re ever going to tackle climate change.”

This article is part of the TomKat Center Spotlight series designed to highlight the impact and trajectory of the work of faculty and students who received funding through our Innovation Transfer Program, TomKat Solutions, and Graduate Fellowships. Stanford University does not endorse any non-Stanford entities, programs, products, or services listed in the article.