Why Should We Repair Our Gear?

We are living in the age of the throw away, buy more and more and fast and faster. But don’t feel bad, it’s not your fault. We have been tricked.

You’re not imagining it, planned obsolescence really has become the dominant model in mass production with things no longer built to last or to be repaired. A sophisticated advertising industry persuades people to shop. Mechanisms have developed to make this easier. And ta-da: that’s consumerism, baby!

The pursuit of the next shiny thing means that we are now pre-emptively replacing things that work just fine. How many phones are upgraded while still in working order? How many phones would stay out of the land fill if you could just replace the battery??

So few people now question the out with the (not that) old, that a huge amount of stuff is chucked that is actually totally repairable. In 2023, in London alone, we threw away £1.9 billion worth of repairable things!

But this is changing, albeit slowly. As the landfills become fuller than ever, and the cost of living ever increases, more people are repairing their things to be kinder to the environment and to their wallets. In some places, governments, under pressure from the community, are introducing legislation to support this. Does planned obsolescence have its own expiry date? We can only hope.

Repair is the sustainable choice, the economical choice, but it’s also an act of activism, a big fuck you to capitalism for creating a mindset where you think you need to consume more than you do in order to make a select few very rich, and to keep most of us, very not rich at all. For purposefully making stuff that fails when they could just as easily make something last a lifetime.

When we send out a shiny new bag, it is only the beginning of its long and adventurous life. And contrary to consumerist belief, it gets slowly better over time, not worse. Just like you and me, full of adventures and stories. When you buy a Wizard Works bag, we hope it will be your friend forever. The quality of the construction and materials should last a lifetime when treated with the appropriate care. Things happen of course, a zip failure, a tyre rub situation, but we’re here to fix them when they need.

Not everything has to be box fresh, the modern world is too obsessed with the new, the never aged. But how beautiful it is to be old. Let’s let our things become storied, not rubbish. So what if you’ve got a patch, on your bag or over an eye, all it means is you’ve probably got some really good tales to tell.