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[Music] what is up people of the internet welcome to the waveform podcast I am your host today Ellis Roven I am joined
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by my co-hosts Marquez and I'm David yeah pretty weird huh so guys we host a tech news show we're covering what's new in Tech right and as you may know for
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many of my trivia questions and random tangents I love Tech that is specifically not new and I also love
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buying it and filling my apartment with it right and VHS cassette tapes old anything you know what I mean so I was doing what I do browsing the internet getting ready to buy some stuff and uh I
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found a bunch of VHS types I really liked on this cool site called retrospect and a lot of the time when
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you're buying things like especially VCRs and CRTs uh you are buying from an old guy in the
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middle of nowhere with a garage who just repairs this stuff and you know barely makes enough money to scrape by and it's just sort of like a weird passion project best way to I buy film cameras too by the way right only guy in the
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midwest who doesn't know the value of what he's saying I was think he was along the lines of like old guy whose
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like partner said you got to get rid of this stuff and then they're selling it at a discount that they wish they didn't
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have to all of this is true all of this is true totally uh but so you can imagine my surprise when there's an
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about us tab on this website retrospect and I go and this company has like 40 employees I know and I begin going through their website and I realized they don't just sell VHS tapes and VCRs
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and CRTs they sell film cameras they sell old digital cameras they sell old watches they even make a few original products and I thought this is such a
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cool company I have to find out who's behind it and it turns out it's this really really cool husband and wife Duo named Corey and Adam and they have you
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know no relation yeah we're going to let them explain it in their own words in the interview um
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but David you Avid you're an avid film photographer you've heard of The Impossible Project so The Impossible
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Project uh some odd years ago when Polaroid shut down their instant film operation um the factories were all closed and it became sort of impossible to get this film a little project got
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started called The Impossible Project where they would just acquire as many Polaroid cameras as they could take
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whatever film was in there out of them make sure the film was still good bring the cameras back to life and sort of
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become the official supporter of these Polaroid cameras and then the way this cool business retrospect got started is it was these two college kids Cory and Adam really liked Polaroid cameras when
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it got shut down they started going around thrift stores buying as many of them as they could just kind of obsessively and when they got linked up
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with The Impossible Project they became one of the impossible Project's main suppliers makes sense yeah and also a
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bunch of uh former Impossible Project employees now run a little shop called Brooklyn film camera which is one of the
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like best places to buy revamped Polaroid sx70 they're hardcore about fixing Polaroids they're like one of the only places in the United States that does it um and they're great and I'll
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let them tell the rest of the story of how this blossomed into this 40 person massive business but uh I hope you guys enjoy this wild retro ride we're about
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to go on exciting retro Tech so without further Ado I will let Adam roll the interview and away we go through the magic of editing
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whoops I know it is not a Friday we will have a normal episode for you then but for now we have another cool midweek bonus
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episode and longtime listeners of the podcast will know I always want to talk about CRT televisions and analog videos and VHS tapes and VCRs and there's not a
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lot of room or space for me to do so so um amidst all of my crazy tape collecting I came across a very cool website called retro ect.com and I met
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the two very cool people who own this very cool website and today we're going to talk all about tech that is
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disappearing from our lives and why it's cool and how to repair it and and a whole bunch of really great stuff so
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welcome Corey and Adam thank you so much for inviting us of course I'm so excited
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as soon as I got the email back from you guys I was like yes um so the way we like to kick these things off is if you
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guys met someone at a party and had to explain to someone who had no context whatsoever what it is you guys do what's the pitch um so retrospect is a consumer
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electronics company that uh specializes in uh a lot of retro Tech uh we both refurbish and restore some of the retrotech and we produce some of it and then the third pillar is that we also
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sell other people's um newly manufactured uh retrotech or things that are adjacent to it uh such as music um
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or film cool cool way cool so how did this journey begin for you guys because I think um you know we if you look through the internet you go on eBay Facebook Marketplace you'll see you know
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random guys in their basement putting together old VCRs and stuff like that but you guys have this like really
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comprehensive business that tackles a lot of avenues so so yeah how did this get started and and then how did it get
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to where it it is now yeah good question our origin story is very much wrapped up in Polaroid story um and they have a great story too
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there's a lot of great documentaries about how Polaroid Corporation ended and sees their manufacturing of instant film and how this great company called The Impossible Project bought miraculously
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the last standing film Factory in the Netherlands and kept the machines running to reproduce uh instant film as
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we know it today and it's actually um improved from those early days where they had to reformulate the chemistry of the film so our it's a great story I
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mean I could talk about that forever um we were users of Polaroid film and uh when polid stopped they like abruptly announced the end of film Manufacturing in like what year it was around 2005 but
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they still had some um materials to make it for a couple of years they had a sell Off plan so what was happening on eBay
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and the like is people suddenly like a pack of polar instant film was like 30 40 bucks on eBay where historically you
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know in the 2000s it was maybe $10 um so we were users of instant film super sad that film was disappearing um we heard about the Impossible Project
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early on and um our solution for continuing to shoot film we were broken college students we could not afford the $30 eBay film our little hack was going to thrift stores and finding cameras
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that still had film inside uh and shooting what was left so you could get you know a Polaroid camera at Goodwill
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for a couple bucks it had five good shots left and that's what we would use and it people were donating them in
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masses like I remember going to a thrift store and you could find like 10 polid cameras on the shelf that is not true
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anymore um but what happened was we asked a giant collection polar cameras um and at that time Adam and I this is back when we were dating we're now married we moved to Milwaukee where we
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are now for graduate school and we moved like bins and bins of cameras with us and uh decided that that was uh not something we wanted to have as a fixture
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in our home for uh eternity so we started selling them online and very quickly The Impossible Project started buying them from us so we you know cut out the middleman of eBay and started
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working with them directly to sell them what we call Raw cameras you know we would just find them they had flat fees
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for what they would charge to buy this vintage pled camera and we would work with them in that way but we got really good at it and continued to build these networks of people sourcing them from
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all over the United States um to where it grew and grew uh to where I don't know it it it's at there was a definitive point where it was more than a
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hobby yeah around 2012 we found out we were the biggest Global supplier for uh The Impossible Project for their Hardware their cameras um and that uh just continue
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to uh develop and uh yeah I think at a point it went from like how can we pay a couple of our bills um like it'd be great if I could cover my internet and
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my electric bill and then suddenly it was like oh I think I can pay this semester's tuition um and I think that's
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when it started becoming a little bit more real for us um that there's some business potential there but we assumed
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it would just kind of fizzle out and um our goal was like well if we can get to a good point point with our student
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loans by the time you know then possible project stops buying these we'll feel really
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satisfied yeah um but that uh didn't exactly pan out that way so I guess backing it up a little bit what they were doing with these cameras is internally both in Europe and in New
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York they were refurbishing them themselves and reselling them with their newly made Polaroid film um and yeah so
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we were supplying raw cameras what eventually happened is we were Adam and I were approached by their headquarters
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which were in Berlin at the time to take over the refurbishing and repair of the camera
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uh and we we didn't truthfully know exactly how to do that but we said okay let's do this and we figured it out and they did they were very generous in providing us um training from original
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Polaroid employees from the factory in the Netherlands uh they flew out and trained me and Adam and a few of our
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first staff members to do this this is when Adam was done with grad school I had just finished we had to make a
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conscious decision to be like okay well I guess we're not doing that and we're going to start this business inste uh
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which was wild at the time but in hindsight so amazing I feel really fortunate it feels very serendipitous we
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were very passionate and I think that's what they liked about us is our passion I'm huge we're huge poid die hards I
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we're still collectors at heart and really love the product and the brand so yeah we had nothing to lose uh you know
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we were broke a little less than broke at that point but we still had student loans um and it just felt like what's
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more like what's oh no my debt like I already have a ton of debt um like more crippling debt potentially um that I'll never get out of or perhaps um an
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opportunity to do something that um that it didn't feel like a door that was going to reopen and it it always felt
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like the career was a door that could reopen um at any point but it it's definitely that was the point in which it became a business we went from a um
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proprietor uh so proprietor um uh to uh in LLC we filed the paperwork we named the company retrospect and hired hired staff um so uh that deal uh wrapped up
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in uh early 2015 and um it really accelerated um our business uh I I mean it it accelerated it to the point where
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it started it um and then really helped us uh uh grow from there um a light you pick up yeah I mean I think there's a lot that can be said for those years of primarily working on Polaroid products
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but I think to skip past that and talk about well okay clearly that's not all we have on our website now um at a certain point and we still work very
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closely with Polaroid where licenses they're awesome um they let us do a lot of really cool stuff
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uh I think we'll get into talking about what we do to those cameras which is a cool hybrid of like restoring the Vintage internal internals and uh re
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injection molding the externals and doing cool collaborations and Partnerships but we found it wise
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eventually to not have all of our eggs in one basket and we had all of this uh intellect that we were gaining with our team about how to repair 80s and '90s electronics and uh we you know as a
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phase two decided to pick another product to start refurbishing and that for us was Sony walkman's um and since then it's just catapulted and and we have brought in
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newly manufactured things too like we're not selling used records we sell newly pressed vinyl records combination of new and old cassette tapes um a lot of the
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35 millimeter products that we're putting out right now are newly manufactured so just like anything that
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falls under the loose umbrella of retro retro Tech retro Tech inspired um art site has kind of turned into like a more of like a lifestyle outfitter's One-Stop destination for all of these retro Tech
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things wow that is so unbelievably fascinating um especially the fact that you guys got your start in sort of the procurement side of it all because it's someone who's also obsessed with
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retrotech whose apartment has way too much retro Tech in it one of the hardest parts about it as like a hobby if you can even call it that is finding this stuff it's like it's actually surprising
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that you know even for me who lives in Brooklyn which in a lot of ways is sort of like a retro Tech Mecca because there's so many people acquiring and maintaining it it can be so difficult to
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find a VCR in good shape it can be so difficult to find a CRT where the flyback Transformer isn't winding you
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know there's there's all this stuff so how early on when you guys were collectors before it was a business how were you actually getting these cameras what was the secret
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sauce it was just easier back then to to be honest I mean you had Craigslist Facebook Marketplace wasn't a thing at that point we in Minnesota too and the thrift circuit in Minnesota was
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phenomenal yeah and paired really nicely with Polaroid discontinued their film and knowing knowing Who The Impossible Project was um and The Impossible
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Project though they had an insurmountable task to overcome to create polar film um or
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Impossible film uh with a new formula um it was really challenging to use so even
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people using it weren't super thrilled about it so there's just a lot of these being donated um and and that that was
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the opportunity for us um in which uh the volume was there to support uh what we were doing what I've noticed now too is like so around that time or
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maybe a little bit later there was also like no shortage of point and shoot 35mm
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cameras like you know the Pentax multa like really nice stuff like the stuff that you would maybe I don't know that
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my parents used in the '90s and now that super hard to find again um so I think like being like slightly ahead of the trend is helpful like right now we have we just uh earlier last year launched a
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digital camera program you know early 2000 digital cameras and those you can still find at thrift stores you know you just have a certain group of people who are donating those things I think it
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just depends on like what's trending but I totally agree it's really hard to find good stuff right now and we pay a lot
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for it you know like we our stuff is priced accordingly with the fact that we have to Source it and pay a significant amount and have yield loss like crazy one of our main criteria
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for bringing a program in is that it has to have been mass produced in some capacity because part of our repair and
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refurbishment process is really dependent on taking multiple parts and fusing it into one working part okay
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there's only so much we can do with like new components which we do uh 3D printing which we do um injection
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molding which we do if like the numbers can support it but um the ability to Source quite a few models that at least
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the internals are the same in modular and then piece them back together that's really part of our criteria interesting
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so for example no we don't do at TRS not yet yet um I'm really I'm really glad you touched on that because Uh I that was pretty much much where I wanted to go next before I jump into that I just
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out of curiosity what were you guys studying in grad school oh thanks for asking I have my
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master's degree in speech language pathology oh yeah and I have my Master's of Science and occupational
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therapy oh okay wow so I I do see exactly what you meant when you were like you can always go back to those
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careers but you had this like wonderful opportunity to do this that is so interesting yeah and we picked the
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careers we both have psychology undergrads and we got done with school in like 2012 and it was competitive to
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get a job at Starbucks like we're still recovering from the financial collaps we had um friends that had great degrees
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that couldn't get jobs and we just felt like how do we how do we delay going into the workforce a little bit longer until things kind of resolve um and delay our student loans
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being due so you go to grad school school and I if if you're clever about it you pick things that you don't need to do a bunch of prrs for that you have you know mild interest in and um and at
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that time it was very much the the people that had skills were getting jobs so you really wanted um a specific skill that you could go into the workforce
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with um so that that's what stimulated that decision for us and um out of all the things we do we want to do it with a lot of passion and excitement and of
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course one can do that with their education but um it kind of also felt like a compromise at the same time of of working in those fields because it just felt like you know what what was the
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right thing to do but not necessarily that thing you wanted to do um Mak sense no I totally you know it's funny I I actually really not to talk
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too much about myself here but I can really identify with that I graduated college uh within like three or four
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months of like Co really going into full swing so it was very clear immediately out of school I was not doing anything
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career-wise um and especially since I had graduated with a degree in music um which nothing like that was happening and uh and I fell into podcasting sort
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of backwards and for a long time felt like oh I'm doing this thing that actually has nothing to do with what I'm
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really interested in and and behold it actually led me here which was very nice um but thank you for sharing that about
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you guys I have a few more sort of Midwest core questions for you guys coming later um but I want to talk about
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the tech and I would love for you guys to walk me through the whole lifespan of you guys finding something like a Polaroid camera or a Game Boy or an old iPod it entering the Retro tech shop
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getting post on the website and ending up up in a consumer's hand so like what state are you finding these things in
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how much love do they actually need is it different device by device yeah the whole the whole cycle it varies based on
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the product but um whatever we were able to come up with for refurbishment and repair process for Polar Camas early on has been largely replicable for other products and we've
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looked at and studied and come up with like quality assurance measures and have very formal documentations and processes
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and checks that these things go through and by the way we carry a warranty too because there's some just unpredictable
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things that can happen with these items they're super fragile I think the sx70 folding Polaroid camera is a great
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example these cameras came out in 1972 we're not making new parts that we are opening them up servicing them and
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putting them back together and trying to make good judicious um decisions about what to replace what still has life in it what's caus cosmetically okay what we want to um update uh or replace with
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other parts um yeah I I think things come up in pretty scary conditions but depending on with the Polaroid cameras we have the ability to reshell the ex external so Cosmetics aren't a big deal
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um like I touched on earlier because we try to Source things that were mass produced we always have this element of
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expecting yield loss and you know what's broken on one isn't broken on another and we can take them apart put them
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together steal this part from the PCB put it on this part I stuff like that so um but it really it varies on the product and we have so many different product groups now for refurbished stuff
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um yeah yeah I would say the ideal is we Source things that no one wants and that
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are destined for landfill and we are put in time and energy into it uh to save it
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and make it useful um because there's not a whole lot of value in a company just going online and buying things that
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work and um charging more for it to that consumer because they put a warranty and they clean it um that that is not
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interesting to us and I'm sure um there's that business model out there for plenty and that's that's fine um
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it's just not how we're interested in um running our business so whenever possible we want items like that in which um un l a technician opens it up
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and services it it's it's not usable um is there like a too far gone like like do you see things we were like no there's that's not coming back rust R rust is a big one yeah um I think one we
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had an sx70 once that I I swear was in a house fire I think we just kept it and put it some yeah us yeah it was it was special
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um in that way um yeah yeah so rust is a big one um mold obviously can be a problem especially with with um human health in general um but then with
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cameras the lenses you you often want to avoid um mold but our team also can take
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apart lenses and clean them too um so we we do that process on moldy lenses also
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um so even more to some extent if it's in the lens isn't always a like another challenge is plastic ages
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and gets brittle or as we all know with um more white tone Plastics they yellow with UV damage that is not fixable we do have a full paint booth though like that
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was another Avenue that we explored to try to continue to save some of this stuff um and not throw it away is
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refinishing it and um that was an interesting step to just like build out this whole like professional paint boo it's really fun like it's really cool I yeah we probably could do more with that
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and probably will over time but um yeah there's we're always thinking of new ways to save things yeah the the paint booth is a whole different tangent too
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because that really goes into we have it for the poing cameras um the custom ones that are injection molded because um
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well a camera is a mobile dark room and uh well instant camera is and uh not all
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colors you run are light tight so um we have a paint booth actually to uh paint the inside cavities black uh of
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most of our most of our cameras like when we first started manufacturing these externals we learned that plastic
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is translucent if it's colored um and then they were all light leaking and so we coat the internals
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with a light tight uh coating yeah yeah we um we were working with the engineering firm that helped put together some of Polaroids cameras um in the 9s and worked at
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Polaroid and they're like yeah we did colored stuff and um you just had to put like some tape on a couple key spots
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we're like great and they're like here's the spots you need to worry about and then we got
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our first one back um and we we tested it outdoors and it was just like the most horrendous photo you've ever seen and you know we were really
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panicking about what to do because we spent a lot of time and money on the tools and on the plastic and we had
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purchase orders for uh the colored um program that we were doing so um but it it caused some some really cool Innovation on our end um painting inside of the cavity is miserable um so there's
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a lot of um uh you know creates so much turbulence um in overspray so getting that dialed in really took a long time um but now we have a really good process for it we have a full booth and we have
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a full-time staff member that's all she does so do you find yourselves when you are approaching a task that you don't have a background in like painting the inside of a cavity do you do you find
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that your strategy typically is get online figure out how to do this do it yourself or is it hire someone with the expertise that really does it well and that answer may have changed over time
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too yeah we typically I mean sometimes we should go online sooner um than what than what we do um but um you know we
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often just try to troubleshoot it and problem solve it um I think you know the higher education in general um a
00:27:39
fouryear or a master's degree just teaches you how to critically think through situations and um you know the
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scientific process is applicable every single day in the in the work that we do so you just start thinking critically
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about it and uh figure out what's what's going to work you talk to people and and then of of course um if you're like Cory
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and you're uh significantly smarter than me you'll go online and look at other resources um uh and U there's no shortage of amazing information on the
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internet that people put out there for free about how to refurbish and repair things um I'm sure we've looked at a lot
00:28:20
of it a lot of it's developed internally we have a amazing repair team with a lot of incredible knowledge that that they
00:28:26
brought to the company um um but yeah for sure we're we're watching YouTube videos too it's funny that you guys bring that up because in my time of of
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dealing with all this sort of retr teex stuff I also spent a lot of time on these forums and I've noticed that there's a clear like emotional
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difference between people who are more casual collectors and then the people who are actually keeping the stuff alive
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or like in walkman forums for example you'll still see people who are like oh you have this model you don't have the
00:28:55
mega base oh what are you doing without a director like loser you know what I mean and then as soon as you go to The Forum where people are actually
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repairing these things it's the most like kind loving supportive dialogue you've ever seen I swear people have taken the time to answer the dumbest questions for me in like CRT repair
00:29:14
forums um I've never it is great it it's such a great group of people [Music] welcome back still waveform podcast Marquez David Ellis guys we've were
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talking about retro Tech do you guys have a memory of a specific piece of retr te from your childhood that is very
00:29:40
near and dear to you oh gosh boy yeah see whenever I whenever I talk about retrotech
00:29:46
people get mad at me that it's not old enough so when I think of retro Tech I think Canon T2i yeah to me that's uh
00:29:55
counts Adam shot with that camera for that's my retro Tech right there the first thing that I thought of was hit
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Clips hit Clips do you remember hit Clips I do remember hit clips for those that don't know do you know what iclips
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are I not so before the MP3 player before the iPod well that's why I don't yeah it was uh there are these little
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cartridges that kind of look like T like the actual machine kind of looks like a little tamagachi that is on a keychain
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and you like hook it to your belt clip or whatever on your on your pants and then you would have individualized
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cartridge that are little squares that you put in the device hookups and headphones to and each cartridge was a
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song each one cartridge even a whole song I don't think just part of the song pretty sure I think it was a song I think you're both right I think some of them had full songs but a lot of them
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were were just like a the big chorus and you see how good you kids have it before you go on iTunes and buy an indivual song yeah oh 60 seconds oh my God yeah before you go on iTunes and buy
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a whole song for 99 cents you'd have to like go to Kmart and buy a three pack of uh gosh the first one I had was in sync
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so I bought three in sync hit clips for like $15 but it it was is just insane it was
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more than just like media you would listen to like the whole thing was that it was a keychain and so everyone would
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see what cartridge you had in it it was like very much a way of yeah you would jingle them on your pants and people
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could like see what music you were in yeah be like oh that guy's pretty cool he listened to this it's like the the
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the really retr verion of like the song that plays on is it Myspace that did that where like the song is playing and
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you're like oh that's part of who they are I see yeah that's cool now we just have the weird like thing on Tinder where they're like you can see like someone has the worst music taste ever
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the bottom of their profile your Spotify and just exposes you for like you really are oh gosh dang anyway so we're going
00:31:49
to keep talking about retr tech with Cory and Adam but this next section uh starts off with like this really cool
00:31:55
conversation because not only do they have this crazy operation refurbishing and repairing all sorts of cool stuff they also make their own products their
00:32:06
own original products and specifically the product that they make that um you can find in stores like all over the
00:32:11
country I was in the MoMA design store and I saw one there they make a portable cassette player and for anyone that
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knows anything about portable cassette players making one is actually like a really difficult task they actually mentioned this really ious problem when
00:32:29
refurbing old Polaroid cameras where the the plastic begins to degrade over time
00:32:35
I'm sure and a lot of light leak happens and so when they're re rehabbing these old polar cameras they usually will take
00:32:42
them apart and take them into a paint booth and paint the entire inside black so that none of the light
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can super interesting flashbacks to my uh 3D printed camera yeah right yeah with all the same problems had to paint the inside of that black to stop the from leaking through yeah did not know that anyway yeah in this next portion of
00:33:04
the interview uh I nerd out with Cory and Adam about the differences between a two head and a three head cassette deck
00:33:11
and of course forgot to explain uh what that actually means um and I could try to explain it to you now but we have a very special guest with us perched on marquez's chest ask the pin I was
00:33:23
wondering what the pin would say is the difference between a two head and a three head forehead
00:33:31
like what's the difference between a two head and three head cassette tape player
00:33:36
oh no finding tape player info it's a good sign it's a good start a two-head cassette tape player uses a
00:33:47
common head for both recording and Playback while a three-head cassette tape player has dedicated heads for
00:33:53
recording and Playback offering Superior Sound playback and recording Fidelity that was good that was possibly one of the best answers I've heard it gave it was sort of wrong about the last
00:34:05
part you don't actually get better Fidelity out of it but what it allows you to do is listen to the sound as it's written to the tape whereas a two-head
00:34:16
deck you can only hear exactly what you're putting into it so if there's something wrong with the tape or you're
00:34:23
blasting the tape too hard and it's clipping there's no way to know until you re rewind and play back the tape
00:34:29
whereas with a thread deck you can listen directly to the tape that you just printed on I understood all of that
00:34:35
got it cool it people want to know more they can Google it um and if you're a musician and you're in the market for a
00:34:42
cassette deck you probably want a three-head deck three heads are better than two three heads are in fact better
00:34:47
than two a forehead is better than any of them and a forehead I'm pretty sure there are forehead VCRs now we're
00:34:53
talking um but we'll get to VCRs later in this shebang anyway Adam epic roll the tape a three-head
00:35:05
tape speaking of or I'd like to move on to a specific device that you guys do that when I found out about it it frankly kind of floored me that you guys were able to do this and that's the cp81
00:35:19
and for those that are unfamiliar the cp81 is retrospect's new cassette player and uh not to go on another little tangent but so you know my background is as an audio engineer music guy and a
00:35:31
question I get asked all the time is why are microphones worse which of course is
00:35:36
not true but but if you go back to the 60s and and the 50s through the 70s you have all of these classic beautifully
00:35:43
sounding microphones that you can't get anymore and I have to explain to people it's like not only have we lost the
00:35:51
schematics for how those microphones were originally built we have lost the schematics for the machines that built
00:35:57
the parts that built those microphones like literally the sauce is gone we we we would have to reinvent it to get there and I kind of thought that was the
00:36:08
case with cassette players right because the last big cassette uh mechanism for those audience members that don't know a cassette mechanism is the motors and record head and the transport buttons
00:36:20
and essentially the the part that's actually reading the cassette the last big maker of those T Tanish or tanasan I
00:36:26
I actually don't know how to say it out of business 10 or so years ago so where do you guys like are you Reinventing the
00:36:32
wheel here have you found some random Factory in in China or Taiwan that still make like what what's the deal how do
00:36:38
you make a cassette a new cassette player in 2024 yeah yeah well so I have so much to
00:36:47
talk about there um I guess I'll start with your last question um when we started looking at this actually back in 2019
00:36:57
um there were a couple um on the market that were really just poor performing and um yeah we had sampled them with the manufacturers um and we didn't really
00:37:10
care for it um so we just kept doing the refurbishment um uh and restoration as we took on some more um skilled product development um uh FTE
00:37:25
um uh and time went on some of these factories got a little bit more sophisticated with
00:37:31
their options and we were able to sample some things that we felt like we're getting close to what we wanted um and
00:37:39
then we were able to uh adjust it further even still the quality is so hard to get right out of the factory um so what we have to do is we have a third
00:37:53
party that inspects them um before they leave the factory and even if they fail a couple times and
00:38:01
finally pass they come here and we 100% inspect them and we basically have to retune everything um to get the tuning as precise as we want it to because they
00:38:13
standard deviation we don't feel like is acceptable um we have to adjust the the
00:38:19
playhead or the asouth um quite frequent frequently with them uh we have to do a
00:38:25
lot of other internal fixes on on these players so you know to just get something functioning and usable to the end consumer
00:38:38
is very um uh difficult and um not the not the easiest thing to complete without a team of people that already knows how to repair and refurbish the
00:38:55
Sony walkman's um and can then apply some of that learning and knowledge onto the newly manufactured we look at our
00:39:03
Manufacturing in iterations um so right now we're the cp81 is the first iteration we're working on our cp82
00:39:10
presently so once we can uh get a factory to uh consistently make the internal functions correctly and accurately into our specifications then we start modifying even further the um
00:39:25
uh some of the tech that it contains and also the um the uh industrial design of
00:39:32
the unit so um our goal is to have uh our cp82 on the market within the next year uh that we can then um uh get in front of a wider audience as well the CP
00:39:47
81s really um just are it's further dipping our our toes into the water I guess you know we're kind of at um waste level
00:39:57
um uh in the water right now the the dipping our toes was with the uh Sony um refurbishment process and that was doing really well these are continuing to do well but uh before we jump all in and
00:40:11
are ordering you know tens of thousands of something we want to make sure that um we have the quality nailed down we
00:40:18
have the supplier and the factory um uh exactly uh work into our specifications and that communication is strong uh before we really go big and have like a a larger program that might be in more
00:40:31
uh Mass retail and and to just tie a bow on that I mean the Sony wman are amazing they're
00:40:38
incredible we just can't keep up with the demand you know we can only source so many which is a lot but uh we every
00:40:45
Christmas we sell out of them and they they're incredible machines there's so much R&D yeah poured into them incredible factories uh you know
00:40:57
multi-tool cavities pumping these things out and they're awesome um so we're in our infancy of like trying to fill the void there's there's uh clearly a demand for things that play cassette tapes
00:41:09
which is awesome and we we're printing cassette tapes like never before it seems like every record label is making
00:41:15
tapes all of a sudden yeah yeah it's cool yeah the challenge with with the cassette players is um everyone wants
00:41:22
them um they want high quality and they want low price and it's really hard to kind of merge those two things together
00:41:29
and what we really the way we like to segment it is you know the the thing we can always have in
00:41:36
stock and have a a a good quality performance is our our cp81 and then if you really want um a nostalgic experience um uh with the you know in
00:41:48
our opinion the best uh Consumer Electronic uh the consumer experience of the uh portable cassette player then you have a um which all this is a hilarious
00:42:00
conversation we're talking about cette tapes like Magnetic Tape is also just not the best format to listen music um
00:42:07
we're like you know we're kind of it's it's kind of ironic when you think about it that way but I we love it I love it
00:42:12
our daughter we have a 2 and a half-year-old she loves playing cassette tapes and it's but yeah I mean that's
00:42:19
where we can get into the Nostalgia conversation like having a tangible experience is really something people
00:42:25
are you know and also like so I I'm sure our listeners always know this already know this because I never shut up about it but I have a a huge cassette collection and I always found that even
00:42:36
though like you said yeah there's a lot less Fidelity in a in a cassette tape especially a type one cassette tape than
00:42:42
a modern file there's some records that I would listen to like over and over and over again and never really like got why
00:42:50
they were so popular until I listen to them on cassette and I realized like not that they're recorded poorly or they were made for lower performing systems
00:43:01
but without all of the added harmonics and noise that you get from a cassette the mixes can actually feel a little
00:43:08
empty you know and the and the mixing mastering Engineers I think you know sort of plan for that one one record for
00:43:13
me is the Springsteen welcome to Ashbury Park like I listen to that over and over
00:43:18
again and never gotten it and then I got it on cassette and was like yes this is so great um that's cool this might not
00:43:26
make it in the Final Cut of this episode but as a dieh hard cassette user what are the odds that the cp82 has a thread mechanism oh probably not yeah probably
00:43:42
not um that might be at 83 or 84 um totally you know it's one of the hardest things to accept as a business owner
00:43:54
is what you want to do and what can do um and what what we want to do is Big what we can do is is small we are uh it it's
00:44:06
owned by Cory myself we have no other investors um we have no Venture Capital we it it's it's us to and this is this
00:44:17
is it it started with that small investment of um uh by us to when we started of a couple hundred and it's kind of ballooned into this and that's what we can uh
00:44:30
that's every time we look at VC funding we die a little ins yeah die a little bit inside and and come back to like I rather have it go a little bit slower
00:44:42
and be what we want it to be long term and get to this Finish Line um then try to explain to uh investors why we should make something with uh a certain way
00:44:57
even though a consumer the average consumer might not care or um appreciate it uh so it it causes
00:45:08
this slower Pace to iteration in uh for product development that we're not always super enthusiastic about but it um it is the best decision for our
00:45:21
company and um for our ability to be around for the many years and hopefully be available for our children to run one day or you know for someone to be able
00:45:34
to buy and and you know uh have a really nice yeah that makes me think a question
00:45:40
we get a lot of is like oh yeah I heard Polaroids trending or I heard vinyls trending and it's like we've kind of surpassed there are Trends there are
00:45:50
Trends they're microt trends like I feel like um the digital cameras and iPods are maybe a little bit of a trend but I
00:45:56
think like instead of it just being a trend that comes and goes it's more of like a door opening of like there's this whole new generation interested in retro
00:46:03
Tech and they will keep coming through the door um and we're here to like service provide an experience for them
00:46:10
so like I felt like a natural question to that was maybe like well what if tapes aren't as big of a deal by the
00:46:15
time you're ready to make a thread player it's like well I think they will be they I mean there's only so many
00:46:21
forms of tangible music too so and and the the reason I asked about the three-head player specifically is because the the I got into sorry about
00:46:33
the mic there I got into cassette um when I was doing a lot more music and I picked up an old thread deck so that I could effectively use it as like an effect pedal like run it out of the
00:46:45
computer into the uh record head and then immediately hit the play head and go back out and so uh man a little mini
00:46:51
thread player that I could use both in my music studio and there's a a pretty big musician that um their manager contacted us about doing a
00:47:03
cassette um uh player with and they they know cassettes very well and it didn't didn't get off the ground because it wasn't a uh exactly that a three head um so if we ever get there in
00:47:18
in the future um I'll know who to hit up yeah exactly I have a few more Tech questions
00:47:24
but I first I have to ask does that sort of thing happen a lot where either like uh an individual person or an artist or
00:47:32
maybe a design or a full Studio or a full comedy go like oh I need this retro oh they're the they're the guys does
00:47:39
that happen a lot yeah most of our opportunities are organic um we had to wear a lot of hats
00:47:46
uh and there's no no way we can do it all or or sorry there's no way we can hire other people to do some of this stuff it's just so expensive to uh
00:48:00
have people in seats that are just there to reach out and to collaborate and uh hopefully make something happen so often times we have people comeing to us and occasionally we'll reach out to people
00:48:12
and hope hope for the best and a lot of times it does work out but you might have to cast a pretty wide net of you know dozens of people and you get you hear back from one or two um and that's
00:48:25
you have to be uh you have to be okay with u rejection and you also have to figure out how to tactfully reject others and and I I
00:48:39
actually rather be rejected than be the one rejecting uh I I don't care I I just
00:48:45
want I want everyone to be my friend I want everyone to like me all the time it's a disease it's a
00:48:50
Midwestern there must be something in the water here um where we just all want that it's hard to say no it's hard to
00:48:56
say no yeah we get a lot of requests from prop houses from oh bet yeah like TV like we need a tomorrow by 10 a.m. please can you send this and yeah it's
00:49:07
fascinating we yeah been in our products have been in a few TV shows but not like branded placements just like oh yeah we
00:49:14
have this old thing well if you need a a specific model of something so that it's
00:49:20
period correct I don't I genuinely don't know where else you'd Source one that you knew uh was was going to work if you
00:49:26
needed it to my my CRT at home that I use for all of my random CRT stuff was actually a prop
00:49:33
on the Hulu wuang show which I think is how a lot of that stuff ends up staying alive um so we've been talking about walkman's Polaroids the these devices that have complex mechanical systems and
00:49:47
of course mechanical systems that go bad and that you guys then need to go fix but you also mentioned
00:49:52
digicams and and how yes digicams are they're having this res actually just today on the subway I saw someone doing
00:49:59
some street photography with a little 5 megapixel dude but a digam has almost no
00:50:04
mechanical Parts it's a bunch of solid state components it's a bunch of chips so how do you how do you actually repair
00:50:12
that or or can you like what does that look like yeah the value with us doing that typically is that we can Source new batteries for them we can get new memory
00:50:23
cards or or some of them are like smart media and you can only get like vintage cards um and we put together the entire
00:50:31
kits we do all the testing on them but yeah um typically if it's not working there's you um can figure out the board
00:50:38
that's not working on it and if you have a replacement one you can swap them um but you're you're doing a lot of swaps
00:50:44
rather than um actual repairs and in some ways that makes it easier and other ways it makes it miserable yeah you get
00:50:51
to a certain time frame with circuit boards where you you can't fix them they're proprietary and unless you're going to try to go remake the boards
00:51:02
which is almost never going to be lucrative for US unless we have like a huge demand um yeah it's definitely like
00:51:08
just kind of making it an easy experience for someone to get into I think cam quarters is another one that's
00:51:14
like profoundly confusing to people like it's not super simple to record on VHS and digitize that that's just not as simple as like plugging some things into some things you need you need a lot of stuff so um kind of giving people the
00:51:28
tools they need to uh take on some of these Hobbies um I will say though like what has happened historically for us is that's how we've started with a product like digital cameras and then they like
00:51:41
all the broken ones just get like stored and storage be like our hoarders and keep everything and then suddenly
00:51:48
something comes up where we can fix one key thing that often fails or decide to manufacture something that solves the problem but because we have so much like dead stock sitting here uh then it
00:52:00
becomes viable so we hang on to a lot of that stuff and yeah and we try to categorize it to when it goes into uh
00:52:07
kind of our Cold Storage uh so we we can look at a spread sheet and say well gosh
00:52:14
we have 3,000 units that all have this broken part on it um and if we simply remade this they're we sell them at $100 a piece and you know if it costs x
00:52:26
amount of dollars to remake this part and all this time to to repair it then now suddenly it's a viable um Endeavor for us to reverse engineer and remanufacture a certain component so
00:52:39
we've done that plenty of times on on products um as well where there's just one one thing that continues to fail and it's the best and the worst all at the
00:52:49
same time um it's the best when you get to the finish line and you have the replacement component it's the when
00:52:56
you're trying to actively repair them and you're constantly asking yourself why are we even sourcing this thing that
00:53:02
that always has this one thing that goes wrong right um because then you can't simply swap out stuff uh you're you you
00:53:09
can't really bring your Yi loss down until you have a replacement component for it uh did you did you say 5,000
00:53:17
units in in stock is that is that actually what some of your stock of these items look
00:53:23
like um I mean are portable cassette players yeah we probably have a couple thousand um that are been yeah I mean
00:53:31
you had to Source a lot of these Sony Sports that is crazy oh my yeah it's fun to go digging back in our storage like open a box it's
00:53:42
lot cool stuff so much cool stuff the the sports Walkins are notoriously obnoxious to work on and we kind of like
00:53:48
set those off to the side of like well we'll deal with that later and so there's just bins and bins and bins of sports Walkman I need to go yeah yeah
00:53:55
yeah we have a lot of some really cool stuff um in storage that either you don't have enough time for or um you
00:54:02
don't have the replacement components for where we're our team is working on so Sony is really frustrating in that
00:54:09
it's like every time they made a a portable cassette player it was like they made one new and like didn't like
00:54:17
iterate or you know even just simply like add a couple more components to something they it's like a whole new player so you have a couple you might have five that kind of share similar
00:54:28
Parts um but a lot of them um it's like that part belongs to that line specifically and if you it it makes it really hard to say well we need new
00:54:43
motors for these and um uh we have 5,000 of these portable cassette players in in storage with bad Motors let's just buy 5,000 Motors oh the minimum order Quant
00:54:56
is 10,000 okay well whatever we'll get to we'll we'll need them at some point but they're not all the same motor
00:55:02
they're all you might have then 50 60 70 different Motors that you need to um yeah and they all have different space envelopes for them so it it's it's not
00:55:14
even just as simple as dialing in the speeds on them um it's it's space constraints and yeah the Walkman are complicated in in that the polar 600 cameras on the other
00:55:26
hand are like they're so modular they were designed to just change like the external like cosmetic appearance but
00:55:34
the internals largely stay the same and made it really easy for us to reverse engineer the external moldings well yeah
00:55:40
and it goes into the the the entire point of the plid camera was to sell the film um uh so it's like making a printer
00:55:48
you just you're selling it at Cost or even at a loss so that you can sell the film so there's no reason for them in
00:55:55
the like 80s and 90s to keep reiterating keep yeah developing anything past uh just new outer housings on them um and just modifying things as as needed but
00:56:07
yeah they're very very modular and a very nice uh product to start with uh uh in terms of just building our experience with putting together a bill materials and um uh reverse engineering boards and
00:56:22
figuring out how to um light things out in Eagle and uh yeah uh so that experience then can
00:56:29
kind of catapult us into uh some of these other [Music] products welcome back to the waveform podcast you're catching Us Mid interview with coryan Adam from
00:56:49
retrospect um this next part of the conversation is really interesting we get down and dirty with how a lot of
00:56:56
this stuff is repaired we talk about the difference between repairing a film camera or a Walkman which has lots of
00:57:02
mechanical Parts versus repairing an early 2000s point and shoot digital camera which is almost all ic's that if
00:57:10
you can't track down that gets really tough we also talk about the differences between refurbishing and repairing which
00:57:18
they consider two different tasks and uh finally we talk about the big giant 40 person operation that they have going on there um and I really hope eventually
00:57:30
not that we're going to be going to Milwaukee anytime soon of that I know uh but if we are there Wisconsin Wisconsin
00:57:39
Wisconsin Fear the Deer um but uh one of the coolest parts that they just sort of casually dropped during this part of the interview is that they have some cold storage where they keep products that
00:57:51
have either not been repaired or aren't listed on the website yet and they said they had tens of thousands of Walkman
00:58:00
whoa they have a warehouse with tens of thousands of Walkman this operation like
00:58:05
you think of retr tech as being like a really Niche hoppy and then the scale that Corey and Adam have built their
00:58:11
business to is like really remarkable so I hope you guys enjoy this last leg of the interview and uh without further Ado I'll pass it back to Cory and
00:58:23
Adam so clear clearly you guys are working on a a really broad array of of tech that you're bringing back to life um and as we've been getting ready for this interview uh around the office
00:58:37
everyone has been begging me to ask you guys some right to repair questions which I've been hesitant to do so
00:58:43
because a I don't want to you know put you guys in the line of fire of any tech companies and B it doesn't seem 100%
00:58:49
relevant to what you guys do but I I am curious do you feel like modern-day contemporary Tech is actually more difficult to repair than the stuff of
00:59:03
yester year because some of the things that you're describing just sound like a nightmare to fix you know like
00:59:10
yeah yeah but I don't know the microprocessors and chips and circuit boards they're protected and proprietary
00:59:18
and you can't yeah I mean that's the whole problem we're talking about here right like I would say for sure stuff
00:59:23
today is harder to fix and the fixes that we're doing they're easier in the sense that ideally you can
00:59:31
find um a replacement board uh from a manufacturer and just replace it uh or you can go to the company's website and and buy the component or you can bring it into an authorized dealer that has
00:59:45
access to those um replacement components but as soon as you don't have those replacement boards
00:59:53
available there's not a whole lot you can do with a lot of that Tech and from our Vantage Point um there may be people
01:00:00
out there much more sophisticated and talented than we are that maybe think otherwise and believe and and know
01:00:05
otherwise but from our uh vantage point where we're sitting right now they're they're both they pose their CH their unique challenges in their own
01:00:17
way um we're just more comfortable in the space that we're in because we have exp
01:00:23
doing it which you know it it it almost feels crazy to say out loud right like one of the guy the things that you guys
01:00:29
sell refurbished on your site are VCRs for people that don't know which I would assume is most of our audience has not opened up their VCR or even owns a VCR a VCR head is a drum at a very specific
01:00:42
angle that's spinning at 1800 RPM and if it is even one or a tenth of an RPM off
01:00:48
from that speed you have no picture like like like the VCR literally does not work um and it sound it it feels crazy
01:00:56
to say out loud like yes it's easier to maintain that system of mechanical system of perfection than it is to just
01:01:03
have more chips but for some reason that is the uh that is the world we've found ourselves in today yeah I think a lot of
01:01:11
those uh products were designed to be opened up they're easy to open often and they're designed to be serviced um and people that clearly did it and made careers out of servicing TVs and VCRs
01:01:24
and other technology like that um we' had the pleasure of meeting some of those guys typically that have done that
01:01:30
and seeing their workshops and what they're doing and deciding if that's right for us you know to bring on some
01:01:36
of that repair capability yeah um and yeah like and some of it by the way is like super dangerous I this was one of your questions you had we do not open CRTs it is just like not we are not
01:01:50
doing that the ones we have on our site are dead stock that we found buried in a factory somewhere
01:01:56
I now I I might have to go buy one um that is so dope but yes also actually I just I should say that before I Hur someone don't open any electronic that you don't know what you're doing but
01:02:07
especially the the big three guitar amps CRTs washing machines don't don't open it even if they're unplugged you can electrocute yourself to death even if they're
01:02:20
unplugged anyway sorry did not mean to interrupt you but thank you I think yes PSA you make sure everyone's getting the
01:02:28
right message here yeah um and some of the smaller Electronics the polar cameras has they have a little capacitor
01:02:33
on the flashboard and I don't remember the voltage off hand but it's uh dangerous and we have a lot of training to make sure people handle them safely so yeah um for sure cool well I'm glad
01:02:46
that you started talking about the people because um the thing that first made me convinced I had to interview you
01:02:53
is when I was on your website and I hit the about thing and I saw that you guys have like 25 employees do I have that
01:02:59
right it's actually more we're so um bad about updating that page I checked before we hopped on and it's 40 um which is so cool we feel so lucky to work with
01:03:12
uh cool people you know but we're here every day um we all work in the same building there's there's people in this
01:03:18
room with us right now just working about their jobs um yeah 40 people that is incredible that's more people than we have working here um and like we have about 14ish people here and I'm always
01:03:31
like damn we're so big but so what what tell me about how this staff is comprised is it like you guys running the show and then you have 38 repair people do you have like a small team of
01:03:44
business people is it mostly people on the business end and then a small repair team what is what's it looking
01:03:51
like what did we come up with we yeah we were looking at the the list before the
01:03:56
uh the call um it's like 5050 yeah there's about do you say there's 10 people in
01:04:02
this room or like office in the office area that kind of office positions um and then there's 30 people that work on the floor but within uh the factory space there's customer service and um a
01:04:17
fulfillment and we have that team that's the same team um and we do that strategically to prevent burnout um so that people aren't just answering customer service questions all day every
01:04:29
day that they can get up move around um touch grass you know just uh reorient to to to
01:04:37
life and not have to always be um in front of a computer screen and um you know in customer service you deal with the most enthusiastic people and some of
01:04:48
the uh most difficult people um and there there's sometimes feels like very little in between um so to have that
01:04:56
team do um fulfillment and not have our fulfillment be elsewhere and it's hard to have our fulfillment elsewhere in
01:05:03
addition because there's so many ones and twos um of of products um so there's I think the last time we counted there's over 10,000 SKS um on our site uh but
01:05:14
that's because there's so many one-offs right like we might just ever I just posted to our Instagram today like a WWF
01:05:21
35mm C we're only going to get one of those there's only one we're not going to restock it
01:05:26
um and then that SK lives on Shopify forever uh so right but you you simply can't um you can't send that all to a thirdparty fulfillment center uh and
01:05:39
expect it to be affordable um or uh done as as well as we believe we can do it here and making sure that people get the right items um and uh that it all comes
01:05:52
together Etc so so that that takes um I don't know that's five to seven people that work on the customer service 10 repair refurbishment people 10 well
01:06:03
there's I think it's about 20 people that work on the repair and refurbishment and 10 specific texts that
01:06:09
only work on the repair because outside of the repair you have all the quality inspections um you have things like the
01:06:17
670 cameras have Leathers on them that need to be taken off because that's how you access all the the hardware to take
01:06:24
the camera apart um and that has a bunch of glue on it and you have to scrape all that off by hand and you have to polish
01:06:29
all the Chrome and clean it and it's such a pain in the rear um so there's a lot of supporting um uh individuals that work on the testing and cleaning um
01:06:42
prior to repair or post repair or both packaging yeah yeah packagings yeah yeah so when you are adding to your big family at retrospect uh specifically in
01:06:54
the repair department are you finding people who somehow already have all of these random skills or do you guys have like a training program as part of what uh
01:07:07
retrospect we rely heavily on our training program and really believe if the passion is there we can train most anybody truthfully like we've had some
01:07:19
hires that have brought background knowledge to the table especially early on one of our first hires Brian our head of repairs incredible like he was very
01:07:29
integral to building this business with us and really invested in learning how to repair the complex Polaroid cameras
01:07:36
and has like written his own they're top secret but like repair books that are just like Giant and that we use
01:07:41
internally to train out um but as we've uh grown certainly I mean it's always interesting to we've had very good luck in both Realms hiring people that come with background knowledge and those who
01:07:53
haven't and just have a general passion for and and there is something to be said sometimes it's those people who are
01:07:59
passionate that are kind of coming with a blank slate that take really well to some of our methodologies um which is always mindful
01:08:07
of productivity unfortunately as one must be in a business um you know you can't spend six hours repairing the same thing uh you blow through your profit margin so we we try to maintain a nice
01:08:19
balance of uh productivity and quality um and I think bringing people in who have experience repairing take better to that sometimes that might be an overgeneralization yeah yeah and we have
01:08:32
we're actually looking at it too because we don't pay a ton of attention to it um
01:08:38
but it's actually a 5050 male to female ratio on the repair technicians as well and traditionally when we put up um
01:08:46
repair technician jobs it's I don't know that we've ever had a woman um uh apply
01:08:52
uh to that uh position and there's no reason not you know the skill sets are all the same um across uh whatever you identify as for your gender
01:09:06
and um yeah so I I think that also keeps a really nice balance for the company as a whole and um a lot of our most of our repair
01:09:17
technicians start as refurb technicians so they have a year or two experience before they go into the repair so they
01:09:24
really know the products well can you explain what the difference between what a refurb technician does
01:09:30
and what a repair technician does yeah I think that's semantics worth explaining because I think we kind of use it
01:09:36
internally um differently we comprise refurbishment of like the Cosmetic cleaning component of it and making it cosmetically acceptable um and repair is
01:09:48
repairing it the typically the person is polishing it isn't the person who's fixing the actual uh mechanical problems
01:09:55
yeah naturally when it's being repaired if it's a internal cleanliness the repair technician needs to clean it um
01:10:03
but so much of the the tech it it's really dirty and really gross and it takes us a a long time to clean it up and um you want technicians that really
01:10:15
have a passion for that are detail oriented and they they poured over really nicely for then repair
01:10:22
technicians and often there these Tech the reer technicians are also doing uh the quality tests after the repair has been done or they're triaging it before it goes to repair and writing notes for
01:10:34
the repair technician of like what's wrong with it so there's often a lot of desire to learn because they know the
01:10:42
symptoms um that of something when it's going wrong but they don't have the final solution of how to solve it um so
01:10:50
there's there's a lot of added drive that gets put into that then if you're just in a seed and to kind of fix this
01:10:57
and you don't know why it matters uh so that that's been a really um uh interesting uh development in our learning as just two kids that are
01:11:10
running a company and trying to figure out how to uh excite and motivate and hire the right people that sounds so
01:11:17
fulfilling just just from the outside like like you know cleaning and polishing and and making a product feel
01:11:24
nice and and and giving love to a product and then at the same time wondering like but how are they gonna
01:11:30
fix that belt oh man I wish I could wish I could I because you're you're when you I've spent a lot of time with the 90%
01:11:36
isopropyl in the Q-tip you know what I mean I know I know what it takes to clean this stuff and you you love it
01:11:43
when you when you've taken all the knobs off and you've cleaned every crevice you love the thing that you just cleaned and
01:11:48
so to heal it would be so emotionally fulfilling wow yeah yeah it for the right people people they super enjoy it yeah well and the the repair process takes a long time to train someone so
01:12:02
typically if we can start with a referb technician then we know they're going to be here for a while and they really love
01:12:09
the company that they're working for and you're not just having all that um effort that gone into training kind of
01:12:16
go out the door um and have to restart that program all over again because for that 670 repairs it's about a year until someone's um proficient and uh doesn't
01:12:27
need their work consistently checked and audited um because we we want it to be right and uh we want to get our um
01:12:36
re-repair uh percentages in our customer um uh Service uh needs down all the time we we look at those metrics and we look at
01:12:48
how to how to lower them constantly and make sure that consumer is having the best experience possible with the device
01:12:54
that they're buying do is it the same people that are repairing a Rolex Oyster Perpetual and are also repairing a Game Boy Color
01:13:07
or do you need separate casts of characters to get this stuff done I love the ju deposition um the watch our
01:13:15
mechanical watches we work with uh one of our buddies here in Milwaukee who super cool Justin Brock as is his name
01:13:22
he is comes from a family his dad's a Jew he repairs those so that's kind of like a side collaboration thing we don't
01:13:28
work on watches here although how cool we would need a clean room I think um oh um it's just it's very precise uh he actually has a a watch maker that
01:13:39
Services all of them um so in Justin really focuses on the 20 30 $40,000 watches um so he's he's kind of offloading his inventory that he's like
01:13:53
well these are cool I really like these but it's not worth my effort to try to get a buyer for these um so we think that they go nicely on our site and uh
01:14:04
really fit the entire um analog portfolio um so yeah but to get to the spirit of your question crossover um there is crossover I would say the Polaroid repair people are a little more
01:14:18
siloed um just because like Adam just said for the sx70 folding cameras the training time is like a year um so we utilize their talents on very specific
01:14:30
products but yeah a person who repair as a typewriter also works on a Walkman who works on an iPod like there's a lot of
01:14:37
crossover and cross training which I think gives a variety to the job to if we can sometimes it's not possible or
01:14:44
there isn't time or Personnel available for cross training but it is definitely uh the goal to cross train yeah to cross train absolutely and I think it just
01:14:56
creates job satisfaction um where you work some variety doesn't feel like every day is exactly the same
01:15:03
um yeah people like you said they fall in love with these products too and you know you you learn something new and you
01:15:09
fall back in love and and you remember why you like coming to work every day so um you know having having that
01:15:17
opportunity for technicians that um do really good work and have kind of graduated from the consistent audits
01:15:23
from our head of repairs uh to learn other things is is is great and then it creates some redundancies for us uh what
01:15:30
you don't want to have happen is you have one person that knows how to do something and they get a really great opportunity elsewhere and they take it
01:15:37
and suddenly you need to start over um with a repair technician that doesn't know anything about that and you have no one to train them um or or the person that was doing that day in and day out
01:15:48
isn't around to give them that initial training um our head of repairs of course can train someone but it it really is nice when you have a buddy that's right next to you working that
01:15:59
you can ask questions um right away and not feel like you're interrupting um someone across the warehouse that when you have a question right totally so my
01:16:10
last question about people might sound a little ridiculous but I do mean it and I
01:16:17
also I'm going to have to explain some stuff because we have a lot of listeners who are not in the US so if you're not in the US and you hear Americans talking
01:16:24
about the Midwest they are talking about a zone that no one has exactly Divi excuse me defined that begins somewhere around Ohio and ends somewhere around
01:16:38
Iowa maybe does that sound right to you guys all I know is Wisconsin is definitely the Midwest Wisconsin definitely yeah Wisconsin is arguably about as Midwest as it gets and the
01:16:50
Midwest is historically where things that were made in America got made America's Auto industry is in the midwest um hu huge amounts of
01:17:01
American manufacturing historically has happened in the Midwest and so do you guys feel obviously the Midwest is not
01:17:09
the manufacturing Hub it once was but do you guys feel that retrospect could exist anywhere other than the Midwest and do you guys feel like in what you do you're actually you're still able to tap
01:17:20
into that lineage present in the Midwest I love this question I think it's super
01:17:26
interesting I think being in the midwest helped catapult our business having access specifically to injection molders and I I wouldn't say this location's
01:17:38
necessarily known for injection molding certainly paper production is very um key to Wisconsin so when we started making our own packaging working with local manufacturers was really nice and
01:17:50
I think the world is only getting it's it's only getting easier to make stuff anywhere um but for us new to manufacturing being able to visit the
01:18:02
factories where um our tools were hung in in molding parts and to see it and to talk to the engineers and the business owners who are making this stuff was really a key part of our learning um and
01:18:17
while we don't we do uh the Polaroid externals are still uh manufactured here in Wisconsin um other things we manufacture elsewhere but um it it I
01:18:29
think it was a unique opportunity to be able to see it uh in person and yeah I I
01:18:36
I think it was I think it helped us being where we were yeah individuals are are very much akin to working with their hands and uh I think there's just
01:18:49
it's a very Blue Collar city Milwaukee um so there's no shortage of of people that are willing and ready to work and want to work hard and are just great to be around and I I think in that regard
01:19:04
of like just the human resource side of me of just wanting to work with people that you like and that you get along with and that um you can roll in the right direction with that's been a
01:19:17
really the Midwest has been a really great place for us of course we don't know because we haven't tried anywhere else um and you know I don't want to um
01:19:25
throw shade at any other state because I'm sure other places would be great to work in as well but there's some Advantage there's also disadvantages um
01:19:33
we're not in the greatest like space for shipping around um whether or not we're
01:19:38
importing or we're just shipping to California um which a lot of our customers are in California or New York um or um Texas so um the Chicago orders
01:19:50
are nice um but otherwise you know we're we're spending decent amount on shipping
01:19:57
um and while we really tried initially to have our products all made in Wisconsin and we did for many years have about I think we're counting the miles
01:20:09
um before this it was like a 20 mile radius of everything was coming in um it wasn't even the cost that drove us away from um using some of the local vendors
01:20:20
is really about their ability to produce quality and consistency volume um and and sometimes not volume in the larger sense volume in you know we do a lot of small exclusives uh and it's it's hard
01:20:33
to find someone that wants to even bother quoting out something if it's only 500 units or 200 units uh they you
01:20:41
can really get gobbled up uh quickly in your pricing and make it unaffordable for your buyer for uh the end consumer
01:20:49
uh so unfortunately um not all of our stuff is still made in the US um and we do have to um uh import uh some of it but uh whenever possible we we try to
01:21:02
use us suppliers um and when uh on top of that when possible we try to use uh people in the Milwaukee Metro cool way cool um I should have asked earlier you guys moved to Milwaukee for grad school
01:21:18
did I have that right or did you move after grad school and something else brought you there um we're both from a town in
01:21:27
Wisconsin called applon okay it's probably a city is it a city I don't know it's like 2 hours north of here so
01:21:33
Wisconsin is home we went to Minnesota for under and then came back home to Milwaukee for graduate school so this is this is still where our family is um I
01:21:46
yeah I mean I think in terms of dreaming like we love to do retrospect LA or retrospect New York and like try to make small version of this especially when it comes to like we repair people can send
01:21:59
in their own cameras and things of that nature like have multiple locations but yeah for now this is home and we're
01:22:05
happy to be here um I the second there's a retrospect New York I'm kicking down the door um can we talk a little bit about your guys's space because on our
01:22:17
last phone call you mentioned that you have how what was the square footage if you don't mind me asking 15,000 and then
01:22:24
we have um a um a warehouse where we store you know like those Cold Storage items so uh kind of deadstock inventory um of like portable set players we can't
01:22:39
do anything with at the moment um we'll go into a cold cold storage uh facility rather than renting out um uh additional space that that kind of makes sense for us um so yeah it's a it's a pretty
01:22:51
decent sized footprint um we're like we could easily fill up 30,000 like wouldn't be difficult whatsoever um we're we're very tightly packed uh right now and um it just comes down to where
01:23:07
do we want to spend what little money we have do we want to spend it on a building or do we want to keep
01:23:12
developing products and iterating um our our devices and that that is where we decided to focus our time and attention on um and we'll just make the best out of the space we have uh in in the
01:23:26
meantime can people come visit you should they have a reason I believe on your website I saw that you have a small
01:23:33
showroom now yeah we do um the space we're renting now is perfectly set up for this
01:23:40
little room in front where we showcase some of our stuff especially people we work with the local film lab to
01:23:46
facilitate film processing just CU they're a little farther west and we're closer to the Metro part of the city but
01:23:53
um yeah people can pick up their orders here they can shop our little selection they can shop
01:23:58
online and get something pulled up from the back um and we do upon request give tours if we're available um it's not a great shopping experience I wouldn't recommend yeah don't come shop like uh
01:24:12
we have a lot of work to do there um but definitely if you if you ever are in the
01:24:17
area and uh especially if someone knows that they're going to be in the area and they want a tour I've had people email
01:24:24
um our customer service team before and if I'm not around or core is not around someone else will give them a tour um we
01:24:31
we love sharing what we do with with people we're very private about what we did initially when we only had one buyer
01:24:39
and it was Polaroid um it just felt like we don't need to brag about the business that we're getting we don't need to we're not trying to sell to other people um so
01:24:53
we're just this quiet business that just hummed along and and supplied Polaroid stuff um and now since we are um uh direct to Consumer and B2B uh and have
01:25:05
many other customers than just Polaroid uh we get to share what we do or we feel uh like there's value in Sharing what we do um
01:25:16
and uh we're so excited to to talk to people about it and to uh show people under our space so if there's any listeners out there um in the midwest that want to
01:25:29
make a trip out here or to come to Milwaukee um feel free to to reach out oh that is so kind of you guys um I have a few more questions actually I think I
01:25:41
just have one h two more questions and then and then we can put a bow on this the first one is um in in your words
01:25:50
according to your hearts why is fighting this fight against obsolescence so important we talked about this a little bit before I think I think we have similar answ
01:26:03
too I I think the next generation is very hungry for tangible experiences so maybe this isn't a direct answer to
01:26:15
obsolescence specifically terms well okay why is why is what we're doing important you know and I I feel very defensive of gen Z or now gen Alpha
01:26:28
and people give him a hard time for liking cassette tapes or liking vinyl like how incredible to be well-rounded
01:26:35
and care about different formats or history or technology there's so much incredible science behind some of this stuff like how vinyl Works super
01:26:46
interesting when you really dive into the weeds of how it works um you know we have this next Generation growing up on
01:26:52
screens where their phones fulfill all of those needs photography music um those are kind of the main ones and and there's this whole generation that's
01:27:04
very curious about other formats and we think that we can fill the void and educating providing hopefully positive experience with this technology and just
01:27:17
you know sourcing it in Mass giving someone a slightly different experience than finding it on eBay and hoping it
01:27:22
works right that's kind of our what our angle is um and yeah I I as long as there's someone and there's by the way we're not the only ones doing
01:27:34
this I think our strategy is to scale big if possible there's lots of small Outfitters that are refurbishing and repairing things there's other people making cassette players and you know
01:27:45
we're friends with them too we are rewind is another one we we're going to um be working with them soon on
01:27:50
something they're technically our competitors but it's like the more the marrier right like putting these products out there
01:27:57
um and yeah I think we just want to be a a resource for people to have an analog
01:28:04
experience yeah what I often think about is like Leisure is not that old of a concept um uh Mass production's not that old of a concept like consumer
01:28:15
electronics aren't that old we're still figuring out what's good and what's not and I think for many years we just let the wheels of capitalism decide and uh
01:28:28
now there's just now the consumers are are deciding a little bit more and they're saying and and there's access to
01:28:34
to a lot more of this stuff thanks to the internet and um I I think it gives an opportunity for
01:28:42
us to live in both worlds and I'm not going to use my 35 mimer camera for every photo I take but I'm going to use it for some of the really special meaningful moments of my life
01:28:55
um and just like I'm not going to listen to every single album on cassette um but
01:29:00
you know if I'm at a concert and uh I I don't want to carry around a record uh it's much easier to support an artist by buying their cassette and you then have uh
01:29:12
a a souvenir from that that experience and then you also get to relive that experience uh through uh tangible media
01:29:19
and I think that's great and both can can exist um without conflict and and that's what's exciting to me and we want to be a an entry point for
01:29:32
people that have that Curiosity and um kind of be that just welcoming friendly Midwestern company that uh is you're not afraid to go in and ask silly questions
01:29:45
uh we've all started um by asking silly questions and um uh we we really welcome that and want to serve that population of of
01:29:57
individuals whether they're uh gen alpha or Baby Boomers it it doesn't matter to
01:30:03
us yeah that we have customers on both sides yeah wow you know I loved that answer so much from both of you I think I think I just want to call it there I think I want that to be the sunset but
01:30:15
before we do go if people want to find you guys where can they find you what do you want
01:30:21
people to click what do you want people to know this is your time to share anything that you would like to
01:30:27
share oh thanks yeah retrospect decom we spell retrospect with a k at the end instead of a c um we hang out on Instagram the most sadly we haven't well
01:30:39
we haven't really dive dove into the Tik Tok world but maybe someday so Instagram is where and honestly I still do a lot
01:30:45
of the GM so um you can come talk to me there if you want to um yeah we have you know
01:30:54
if someone wanted to shop with us it would mean a lot if it was on our actual e-commerce website retrospect decom you
01:31:00
know we have some things up on eBay some things up on Amazon but yeah we have a program going into urban a program going
01:31:06
into Kohl's um so there are some some things that you might be able to find in your um in the city you live in um but
01:31:15
yeah certainly the the do uh would mean a lot to us yeah that's really it great guys thank you so much for doing this this was such a blast I cannot wait for
01:31:30
this was just so great I've been waiting for so long to have this conversation on the podcast so thank you very much Adam
01:31:36
Corey retrospect tocom go check it out uh you will not be disappointed um thank you guys very much thank you so much appreciate it
01:31:48
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