Retro Tech with Retrospekt!

32:17Before starting EBCLIS, tell your If you have a parasitic infection, searching for real relief, ask your doctor about Epclus and visit epclus.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. I'm Christian McCaffrey, pro running back, and Abercrombie is an official fashion partner of the NFL. I'm not kidding when I say NFL by Abercrombie broke the internet last year, and I think this season's lineup is even cooler. And so does my wife, who keeps stealing all my hoodies. Stay fit for the season and Abercrombie's newest arrivals. shop nfl by abercrombie in the app online and in store

32:57welcome back still waveform podcast marquez david ellis guys we were talking about retro tech do you guys have a memory of a specific piece of retro tech from your childhood that is very near and dear to you oh gosh boy yeah see whenever i whenever i talk about retro tech 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 that counts that's my retro tech right there the first thing that i thought of was hit clips hit clips do you remember hit clips i do remember it so for those that don't know do you know what it clips are not so before the mp3 player before the ipod well that's why i don't yeah it was uh there are these little cartridges that kind of look like tama like the actual machine kind of looks like a little tamagotchi that is on a keychain and you like hook it to your belt clip or whatever on your on your pants okay and then you would have individualized cartridges that are little squares that you put in the device hookups and headphones to and each cartridge was a song each one cartridge wasn't even a whole song i don't think i think It was just part of the song, pretty sure.

34:08I think it was a song. I think you're both right. I think some of them had full songs, but a lot of them were just like the big chorus and maybe a verse. Just like the TikTok book. So you see how good you kids have it. Before you go on iTunes and buy an individual song. Oh, 60 seconds? Oh my God. Yeah, before you go on iTunes and buy a whole song for 99 cents, you'd have to go to Kmart and buy a three pack of, gosh, the first one I had was NSYNC. So I bought three NSYNC hit clips for like$15. but it was just insane it was more than just like media you would listen to like the whole thing was that it was a keychain and so everyone would see what cartridge you had yeah it was like very much a way yeah you would jingle them on your pants and people could like see what music you're in yeah i'd be like oh that guy's pretty cool he listens to this it's like the the really retro version of like the song that plays on is it in myspace that did that where the song is playing and you're like oh that's part of who they are profile exactly whatever i see yeah that's cool Now we just have the weird thing on Tinder where you can see someone has the worst music taste ever at the bottom of their profile.

35:12You link your Spotify and just exposes you for who you really are. Oh, gosh. Dang. Anyway, so we're going to keep talking about Retro Tech with Corey and Adam. But this next section starts off with this really cool 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 own original products. And specifically the product that they make that you can find in stores like all over the country. I was in the MoMA design store and I saw one there. They make a portable cassette player. And for anyone that knows anything about portable cassette players, making one is actually like a really difficult task.

35:55They actually mentioned this really hilarious problem when refurbing old Polaroid cameras. where the plastic begins to degrade over time. I'm sure. And a lot of light leak happens. And so when they're rehabbing these old Polaroid cameras, they usually will take them apart and take them into a paint booth and paint the entire inside black. So that none of the light can... The light gets through. Yeah. Super interesting. Flashbacks to my 3D printed camera. Yeah, right. Yeah. With all the same problems. Had to paint the inside of that black to stop the light from leaking through. Did not know that.

36:30Anyway, in this next portion of the interview, I nerd out with Corey and Adam about the differences between a two head and a three head cassette deck. And of course, forgot to explain what that actually means. And I could try to explain it to you now, but we have a very special guest with us perched on Marquez's chest. Should I ask the pin? I was wondering what the pin would say is the difference between a two head and a three head cassette deck. Is it similar to a four head?

37:00What's the difference between a two-head and three-head cassette tape player? Oh, no.

37:09Finding tape player info. That's a good sign. That's a good start. A two-head cassette tape player uses a common head for both recording and playback, while a three-head cassette tape player has dedicated heads for 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 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 deck, you can only hear exactly what you're putting into it.

37:49So if there's something wrong with the tape or you're blasting the tape too hard and it's clipping, there's no way to know until you rewind and play back the tape. Whereas with a three head deck, you can listen directly to the tape that you just printed on. I understood all of that. Got it. Cool. People want to know more. They can Google it. And if you're a musician and you're in the market for a cassette deck, you probably want a three head deck. Three heads are better than two. Three heads are in fact better than two. And a four head is better than any of them. And a four head. I'm pretty sure there are four head VCRs.

38:21Now we're talking. But we'll get to VCRs later in this shebang. Anyway, Adam, roll the tape. A three-head 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. And for those that are unfamiliar, the CP81 is Retrospect's new cassette player. And not to go on another little tangent, but so, you know, my background is as an audio engineer music guy. And a question I get asked all the time is, why are microphones worse? Which of course is not true. But if you go back to the 60s and the 50s to the 70s, you have all of these classic, beautifully sounding microphones that you can't get anymore.

39:14And I have to explain to people, it's like, not only have we lost the schematics for how those microphones were originally built, we have lost the schematics for the machines that built the parts that built those microphones. Like, literally, the sauce is gone. We would have to reinvent it to get there. And I kind of thought that was the case with cassette players, right? Because the last big cassette mechanism for those audience members that don't know, a cassette mechanism is the motors and record head and the transport buttons and essentially the part that's actually reading the cassette. The last big maker of those, Tanishin or Tanashen, I actually don't know how to say it, went out of business 10 or so years ago.

39:59So where do you guys like are you reinventing the wheel here? Have you found some random factory in China or Taiwan that still make like what's what's the deal? How do you make a cassette, a new cassette player in 2024? Yeah, yeah. Well, so I have so much to talk about there. I guess I'll start with your last question. When we started looking at this, actually back in 2019, there were a couple on the market that were really just poor performing. Oh, I know. Yeah, we had sampled them with the manufacturers, and we didn't really care for it. So we just kept doing the refurbishment and restoration.

40:46as we took on some more skilled product development FTEs and time went on, some of these factories got a little bit more sophisticated with their options, and we were able to sample some things that we felt like were getting close to what we wanted, and then we were able to 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 party that inspects them before they leave the factory and even if they fail a couple times and finally pass they come here and we 100 inspect them and we basically have to retune everything um it's big to get the tuning as precise as we want it to because their standard deviation we don't feel like is acceptable um we have to adjust the the playhead or the azimuth um quite frequent frequently with them uh we have to do a lot of other internal fixes on on these players so you know to just get something functioning and usable to the end consumer is

42:10very difficult and not the easiest thing to complete without a team of people that already knows how to repair and refurbish the Sony Walkmans and can then apply some of that learning and knowledge onto the newly manufactured. We look at our manufacturing in iterations. So right now, the CP81 is the first iteration. We're working on our CP82 presently. So once we can get a factory to consistently make the internal functions correctly and accurately into our specifications, then we start modifying even further some of the tech that it contains and also the industrial design of the unit. So our goal is to have our CP82 on the market within the next year that we can then get in front of a wider audience as well.

43:16The CP81s really just are, it's further dipping our toes into the water. I guess, you know, we're kind of at waist level in the water right now. the the dipping our toes was with the sony refurbishment process and that was doing really well these are continuing to do well but uh before we jump all in and are ordering you know tens of thousands of something we want to make sure that we have the quality nailed down we have the supplier and the factory um exactly uh working to our specifications and that communication is strong before we really go big and have a larger program that might be in more mass retail.

44:02And to just tie a bow on that, I mean, the Sony Walkmans are amazing. They're incredible. We just can't keep up with the demand. We can only source so many, which is a lot. But every Christmas, we sell out of them. And they're incredible machines. There's so much R &D poured into them. Incredible factories. uh you know 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 which is awesome yeah and we're printing cassette tapes like never before it seems like every record label is making tapes all of a sudden yeah it's cool yeah the challenge with with the cassette players is um everyone wants them um they want high quality and they want low price and it's really hard to kind of merge those two things together and what we really the way we like to segment it is you know the the thing we can always have in stock and have a good quality performance is our cp81 and then if you really want a nostalgic experience with the you know in our opinion the best consumer electronic the consumer experience of the portable cassette player than you have a Sony.

45:28Which all this is a hilarious conversation. We're talking about cassette tapes. Like magnetic tape is also just not the best format to listen to music. We're like, you know, we're kind of, it's kind of ironic when you think about it that way. But we love it. I love it. Our daughter, we have a two and a half year old. She loves playing cassette tapes. And it's, but yeah, I mean, that's where we can get into the nostalgia conversation. Like having a tangible experience is really something people are creating. 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.

46:01But I have a huge cassette collection. And I've always found that even though, like you said, yeah, there's a lot less fidelity in a cassette tape, especially a type one cassette tape than a modern file. There's some records that I would listen to over and over and over again and never really got why they were so popular until I listened to them on cassette. And I realized, like, not that they're recorded poorly or they were made for lower performing systems, but without all of the added harmonics and noise that you get from a cassette, the mixes can actually feel a little empty. And the mixing and mastering engineers, I think, sort of plan for that.

46:41One record for me is the Springsteen Welcome to Ashbury Park. I listened to that over and over again and never gotten it, and then I got it on cassette and was like, yes. This is so great. That's cool. This might not make it in the final cut of this episode, but as a diehard cassette user, what are the odds that the CP82 has a three-head mechanism? Oh. Probably not. Yeah, probably not. um that might be at 83 or 84 um you know it's one of the hardest things to accept as a business owner is what you want to do and what you can do um and what what we want to do is big what we can do is is small we are uh it's owned by cory myself we have no other investors um we have no venture capital we it's it's us two and this is this is it it started with that small investment of um uh by us two when we started of a couple hundred dollars and it's kind of ballooned into this and that's what we can uh that's every time we look at vc funding we die a little you die a little bit inside and and come back to like i rather have it go a little bit slower 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 even though a consumer the average consumer might not care or appreciate it.

48:32So it causes this slower pace to iteration for product development that we're not always super enthusiastic about, but it is the best decision for our company and 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 to buy and, you know, have a really nice business. Makes me think a question 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 trends. There are micro trends. I feel like the digital cameras and iPods are maybe a little bit of a trend.

49:25But I think instead of it just being a trend that comes and goes, it's more of a door opening of there's this whole new generation interested in retro tech. And they will keep coming through the door. And we're here to service, provide an experience for them. So I felt like a natural question to that was maybe like, well, what if tapes aren't as big of a deal by the time we're ready to make a three-head player? It's like, well, I think they will be. yeah i mean there's only so many forms of tangible music too sure yeah so and and what is the the reason i asked about the three head player specifically is because the the i got into sorry both of them right there i got into cassette um when i was doing a lot more music and i picked up an old three head deck so that i could effectively use it as like an effect pedal like run it out of the computer into the uh record head and then immediately hit the playhead and go back out and so uh man a little mini three head player that i could use both in my music studio there's a pretty big musician that um their manager contacted us about doing a cassette um player with and they they know cassettes very well and it didn't didn't get off the ground because it wasn't exactly that, a three-head.

50:45So if we ever get there in the future, I'll know who to hit up. Yeah, exactly. I have a few more tech questions, but first I have to ask, does that sort of thing happen a lot where either an individual person or an artist or maybe a design or a full studio or a full company go like, oh, I need this retro, oh, they're the guys. Does that happen a lot? Yeah, most of our opportunities are organic. We had to wear a lot of hats and there's no way we can do it all. Sorry, there's no way we can hire other people to do some of this stuff. It's just so expensive to have people in seats that are just there to reach out and to collaborate and hopefully make something happen.

51:36So oftentimes we have people coming to us and occasionally we'll reach out to people and hope for the best. And a lot of times it does work out, but you might have to cast a pretty wide net of dozens of people and you hear back from one or two. And that's you have to be you have to be OK with rejection and you also have to figure out how to tactfully reject others. And I actually rather be rejected than be the one rejecting. I don't care. I just want everyone to be my friend. I want everyone to like me all the time. It's a disease. It's a Midwestern. There must be something in the water here where we just all want that.

52:24It's hard to say no. It's hard to say no. Yeah. We get a lot of requests from prop houses. Oh, I bet. Yeah. Like TV. Like, we need it tomorrow at 10 a.m. Please, can you send this? Yeah. it's fascinating we yeah i've been our products have been in a few tv shows but not like branded placements just like oh yeah we have no yeah old thing well if you need a specific model of something so that is 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 needed it to my uh my crt at home that i use for all of my random CRT stuff was actually a prop on the Hulu Wu-Tang show, which I think is how a lot of that stuff ends up staying alive.

53:08So we've been talking about Walkmans, Polaroids, these devices that have complex mechanical systems and of course, mechanical systems that go bad and that you guys then need to go fix. But you also mentioned Digicams and how, yes, Digicams are, they're having this resurgence. Actually, just today on the subway, I saw someone doing some street photography with a little five megapixel dude but a digicam has almost no mechanical parts it's a bunch of solid state components it's much of chips so how do you how do you actually repair 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 cards or or some of them are like smart media and you can only get like vintage cards.

53:57Um, and we put together the entire 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 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 rather than, um, actual repairs. And in some ways that makes it easier and other ways it makes it miserable. Yeah. You get to a certain timeframe with circuit boards where you can't fix them. They're proprietary unless you're going to try to go remake the boards, which is almost never going to be lucrative for us unless we have a huge demand.

54:36It's definitely just making it an easy experience for someone to get into. I think camcorders is another one that's profoundly confusing to people. 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 kind of giving people the tools they need to take on some of these hobbies. 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 all the broken ones just get like stored in storage, be like our hoarders and keep everything.

55:15And then suddenly 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, then it becomes viable. So we hang on to a lot of that stuff. Yeah, and we try to categorize it to when it goes into kind of our cold storage. so we we can look at a spreadsheet and say well gosh we have 3 000 units that all have this broken part on it um and if we simply remade this there we sell them at a hundred dollars a piece and you know if it costs x 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 certain component so 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 same time um it's the best when you get to the finish line and you have the replacement component it's the worst when you're trying to actively repair them and you're constantly asking yourself why are we even sourcing this thing that 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 can't really bring your you lost down until you have a replacement component for it uh did you did you say 5 000 units in in stock is that is that actually what some of your stock of these items look like um i mean our portable cassette players yeah we probably have a couple thousand um uh that and yeah i mean you had to source a lot of these.

57:02I think the Sony Sports Walkmans. That is crazy. Oh my. So yeah, it's fun to go digging back in our storage, like open a box. There's a lot of cool stuff, yeah. There's so much cool stuff. The Sports Walkmans are notoriously obnoxious to work on, and we kind of like 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 Walkmans. I need to go. Yeah, we have a lot of some really cool stuff in storage that either you don't have enough time for or you don't have the replacement components for. Our team is working on... So Sony is really frustrating in that it's like every time they made a portable cassette player, it was like they made one new and didn't iterate or even just simply add a couple more components to something.

57:52It's like a whole new player. So you have a couple. You might have five that kind of share similar parts. But a lot of them, it's like that part belongs to that line specifically. And it makes it really hard to say, well, we need new motors for these. And we have 5 ,000 of these portable cassette players in storage with bad motors. Let's just buy 5 ,000 motors. Oh, the minimum order quantity is 10 ,000. Okay, well, whatever. get to we'll we'll need them at some point but they're not all the same motor they're all you might have then 50 60 70 different motors that you need to um yeah yeah and they all have different space envelopes for them so it it's it's not even just as simple as dialing in the speeds on them um it's it's space constraints then yeah it's yeah the walkmans are complicated in that regard Polarid 600 cameras, on the other hand, are like, they're so modular.

58:57They were designed to just change the external cosmetic appearance, but the internals largely stayed the same. And it made it really easy for us to reverse engineer the external moldings. Well, yeah, and it goes into the entire point of the Polarid camera was to sell the film. So it's like making a printer. 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 the like 80s and 90s to keep reiterating, keep developing anything past just new outer housings on them and just modifying things as needed. But yeah, they're very, very modular and a very nice product to start with in terms of just building our experience with putting together a bill of materials and reverse engineering boards and figuring out how to light things out in Eagle.

59:54And yeah, so that experience then can kind of catapult us into some of these other products.

1:00:28We'll see you next time.

1:00:35It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com.

1:01:09This episode is brought to you by State Farm. for less. Get select style selections, vinyl flooring for just$1.99 per square foot and have it installed before the festivities begin. Our team can help you every step of the way. See a Lowe's Red Vest Associate or visit lowes.com slash holiday install to get started. Lowe's, we help you save. Basic install only. Date restrictions apply. Subject to availability. Install by independent contractors. See associate for details. Contiguous US only. Welcome back to the Waveform Podcast. You're catching us mid-interview with Corey and Adam from Retrospect.

1:01:44This next part of the conversation is really interesting. We get down and dirty with how a lot of this stuff is repaired. We talk about the difference between repairing a film camera or a Walkman, which has lots of mechanical parts, versus repairing an early 2000s point-and-shoot digital camera, which is almost all ICs. that if you can't track down, that gets really tough. We also talk about the differences between refurbishing and repairing, which they consider two different tasks. And finally, we talk about the big, giant, 40-person operation that they have going on there. And I really hope eventually, not that we're going to be going to Milwaukee anytime soon of, that I know, but if we are there...

1:02:32Wisconsin. Wisconsin. Wisconsin. Wisconsin. Fear the deer.

1:02:37But 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 have either not been repaired or aren't listed on the website yet. And they said they had tens of thousands of Walkmans. They have a warehouse with tens of thousands of Walkmans. This operation, like, you think of RetroTech as being, like, a really niche hobby and then the scale that Corey and Adam have built their business to is like really remarkable. So I hope you guys enjoy this last leg of the interview. And without further ado, I'll pass it back to Corey and Adam.

1:03:19So clearly you guys are working on a really broad array of tech that you're bringing back to life. and as we've been getting ready for this interview around the office everyone has been begging me to ask you guys some right to repair questions which I've been hesitant to do so 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 relevant to what you guys do but I am curious do you feel like modern day contemporary tech is actually more difficult to repair than the stuff of yesteryear because some of the things that you're describing just sound like a nightmare to fix you know like yeah yeah but i don't know the microprocessors and chips and circuit boards they're protected and proprietary and you can't yeah i mean that's the whole problem we're talking about here, right?

1:04:15Like, I would say for sure stuff today is harder to fix. And the fixes that we're doing, they're easier in the sense that ideally you can find a replacement board from a manufacturer and just replace it. Or you can go to the company's website and buy the component, or you can bring it into an authorized dealer that has access to those replacement components. But as soon as you don't have those replacement boards available, there's not a whole lot you can do with a lot of that tech. And from our vantage point, there may be people out there much more sophisticated and talented than we are that maybe think otherwise and believe and know otherwise.

1:05:00But from our vantage point where we're sitting right now, they pose their unique challenges in their own way. we're just more comfortable in the space that we're in. Right. Because we have to do it. Which, you know, it almost feels crazy to say out loud, right? Like one of the things that you guys 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 angle that's spinning at 1800 RPM. And if it is even one or a tenth of an RPM off from that speed, you have no picture.

1:05:44Like the VCR literally does not work. And it feels crazy to say out loud, like, yes, it's easier to maintain that system of mechanical system of perfection than it is to just have more chips. But for some reason, that is the world we've found ourselves in today. Yeah, I think a lot of those products were designed to be opened up. They're easy to open often and they're designed to be serviced and people that clearly did it and made careers out of servicing TVs and VCRs and other technology like that. um we've had the pleasure of meeting some of those guys typically that have done that and seeing their workshops and what they're doing and deciding if that's right for us you know to bring on some of that repair capability yeah um and yeah like and some of it by the way is like super dangerous i this was yes one of your questions you had we do not open crts it is just like no we are not doing that like once we have our site our dead stock that we found buried in a factory Wait, they're all, I might have to go buy one.

1:06:53That is so dope. But yes, also, actually, I should say that before I heard someone. Don't open any electronic that you don't know what you're doing, but especially the big three, guitar amps, CRTs, washing machines. Don't open it. Even if they're unplugged, you can electrocute yourself to death, even if they're unplugged. Anyway, sorry for you. Did not mean to interrupt you. Thank you. I think, yes, PSA, make sure everyone's getting the right message here. And some of the smaller electronics, the Polaroid cameras, they have a little capacitor on the flashboard. And I don't remember the voltage offhand, but it's dangerous.

1:07:33And we have a lot of training to make sure people handle them safely. So, for sure. Cool. Well, I'm glad that you started talking about the people. Because the thing that first made me convinced I had to interview you 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 right? It's actually more. We're so bad about updating that page. I checked before we hopped on and it's 40, which is so cool. We feel so lucky to work with cool people, you know, but we're here every day. We all work in the same building. There's people in this room with us right now just working about their jobs.

1:08:16Yeah, 40 people. That is incredible. That's more people than we have working here. We have about 14-ish people here, and I'm always like, damn, we're so big. 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 a small team of business people? Is it mostly people on the business side, and then a small repair team? What's it looking like? what did we come up with we yeah we were looking at the the list before the uh the call um it's like 50 50 it's yeah there's about do you say there's 10 people in this room or like yeah 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 fulfillment and we have that team that's the same team and we do that strategically to prevent burnout so that people aren't just answering customer service questions all day every day that they can get up move around touch grass you know just reorient to life and not have to always be in front of a computer screen And, you know, in customer service, you deal with the most enthusiastic people and some of the most difficult people.

1:09:45And there is sometimes feels like very little in between. So to have that team do fulfillment and not have our fulfillment be elsewhere. And it's hard to have our fulfillment elsewhere in addition because there's so many ones and twos of products. uh so there's i think the last time we counted there's over 10 000 skews um on our site uh so 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 35 millimeter can't we're only gonna get one of those there's only one we're not gonna restock it um and then that skew lives on shopify forever uh right but you you simply can't, um, you can't send that all to a third party fulfillment center, uh, and 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, or, uh, that it all comes together, et cetera.

1:10:48So, so that, that takes, um, I don't know, that's five to seven people that work on the customer service 10 repair refurbishment 10 well there's i think it's about 20 people that work on the repair and refurbishment and 10 specific techs that only work on the repair because outside of the repair you have all the quality inspections um you have things like that 670 cameras have leathers on them that need to be taken off because that's how you access all the the hardware to take 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 had to polish 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 prior to repair or post-repair or both packaging yeah yeah packaging yeah yeah so when you are adding to your big family at retrospect uh specifically in the repair department Are you finding people who somehow already have all of these random skills or you guys have like a training program as part of retrospect?

1:12:02We rely heavily on our training program and really believe if the passion is there, we can train most anybody truthfully. Truthfully, like we've had some 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's very integral to building this business with us and really invested in learning how to repair the complex Polaroid cameras. And it's like written his own top secret, but like repair books are just like giant and that we use internally to train out. But as we've 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 haven't and just have a general passion for tinkering.

1:12:50And there is something to be said, sometimes it's those people who are passionate that are kind of coming with a blank slate that take really well to some of our methodologies, which is always mindful of productivity, unfortunately, as one must be in a business. You know, you can't spend six hours repairing the same thing. You blow through your profit margin. So we try to maintain a nice balance of productivity and quality. And I think bringing people in who don't have experience repairing take better to that sometimes. Sure. It might be an overgeneralization. Yeah. Yeah. And we have, we're actually looking at it too, because we don't pay a ton of attention to it.

1:13:31Um, but it's actually a 50, 50 male to female ratio on the repair technicians as well. And traditionally when we put up, um, repair technician jobs, it's, I don't know that we've ever had a woman, um, uh, apply, 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 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 technicians start as refurb technicians so they have a year or two experience before they go into the repair so they really know the products well can you explain what the difference between what a refurb technician does and what a repair technician does yeah i think that's semantics worth explaining because i think we kind of use it internally um differently we comprise refurbishment of like the cosmetic cleaning component of it and making it cosmetically acceptable um and repairs repairing it typically the person who's polishing it isn't the person who's fixing the actual uh mechanical problems yeah naturally when it's being repaired if it's a internal cleanliness the repair technician needs to clean it um but so much of the the tech it's really dirty and really gross and it it takes us a a long time to clean it up and um you want technicians that really have a passion for that are detail oriented and they they port over really nicely for then repair technicians and often they're these tech the refurb 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 the repair technician of like what's wrong with it so there's often a lot of desire to learn because they know the 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 there's there's a lot of added drive that gets put into that then if you're just plopped in a seed and able to kind of fix this and you don't know why it matters So that's been a really interesting development in our learning as just two kids that are running a company and trying to figure out how to excite and motivate and hire the right people.

1:16:10That sounds so fulfilling. Just sort of the outside, like, you know, cleaning and polishing and making a product feel nice and giving love to a product. And at the same time wondering, like, how are they going to fix that belt? Oh, man, I wish I could. I've spent a lot of time with the 90 % isopropyl and the Q-tip. You know what I mean? I know what it takes to clean this stuff. And you love it. When you've taken all the knobs off and you've cleaned in every crevice, you love the thing that you just cleaned. And to heal it would be so emotionally fulfilling. Wow. Yeah. For the right people, they super enjoy it.

1:16:52Yeah. Well, and the repair process takes a long time to train someone. So typically, if we can start with a refurb technician, then we know they're going to be here for a while and they really love the company that they're working for. And you're not just having all that effort that's gone into training kind of go out the door and have to restart that program all over again. Because for the SXMD repairs, it's about a year until someone's proficient and doesn't need their work consistently checked and audited. Because we want it to be right, and we want to get our re-repair percentages and our customer service needs down all the time.

1:17:40We look at those metrics, and we look at how to lower them constantly and make sure that a consumer is having the best experience possible with the device that they're buying. Is it the same people that are repairing a Rolex Oyster Perpetual and are also repairing a Game Boy Color? Or do you need separate casts of characters to get this stuff done? I love the juxtaposition. The watch, our mechanical watches, we work with one of our buddies here in Milwaukee, who super cool. Justin Brock, as is his name, he comes from a family. His dad's a jeweler. He repairs those. So that's kind of like a side collaboration thing.

1:18:22We don't work on watches here. Although, how cool. We would need a clean room, I think. um but um it's just it's very precise uh he actually has a watchmaker that 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 well these are cool i really like these but uh it's not worth my effort to try to get a buyer for these. So we think that they go nicely on our site and really fit the entire analog portfolio. Yeah, but to get to the spirit of your question, crossover. There is crossover. I would say the Polaroid repair people are a little more siloed just because, like Adam just said, for the SX-70 folding cameras, the training time is like a year.

1:19:21so we utilize their talents on very specific products but yeah a person who repairs a typewriter also works on a walkman who works on an ipod like there's a lot of crossover and cross training which i think gives a variety to the job too yeah if we can sometimes it's not possible or there isn't time or personnel available for cross training but it is definitely uh the goal to cross train yeah to the cross-train? Absolutely. And I think it just creates job satisfaction where you work some variety. It doesn't feel like every day is exactly the same. You have people, like you said, they fall in love with these products too.

1:20:01And, you know, you learn something new and you fall back in love and you remember why you like coming to work every day. So, you know, having that opportunity for technicians that do really good work and have kind of graduated from the consistent audits from our head of repairs to learn other things is great. And then it creates some redundancies for us. What 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 and suddenly you need to start over with a repair technician that doesn't know anything about that and you have no one to train them or the person that was doing that day in and day out isn't around to give them that initial training.

1:20:46Our head of repairs, of course, can train someone, but it really is nice when you have a buddy that's right next to you working that you can ask questions right away and not feel like you're interrupting someone across the warehouse that when you have a question. Right. Totally. So my last question about people might sound a little ridiculous, but I do mean it. And I also I'm gonna have to explain some stuff because we have a lot of listeners who are not in the U.S. So if you're not in the U.S. and you hear Americans talking about the Midwest, they are talking about a zone that no one has exactly defined that begins somewhere around Ohio and ends somewhere around Iowa.

1:21:33Maybe does that sound right to you guys? I know it's Wisconsin is definitely the Midwest. Wisconsin is arguably about as Midwest as it gets. And the Midwest is historically where things that were made in America got made. America's auto industry is in the Midwest. Huge amounts of American manufacturing historically has happened in the Midwest. And so do you guys feel, obviously, the Midwest is not 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 still able to tap into that lineage present in the Midwest?

1:22:19I love this question. I think it's super interesting. I think being in the Midwest helped catapult our business, having access specifically to injection molders. And I wouldn't say this location is necessarily known for injection molding. Certainly paper production is very key to Wisconsin. So when we started making our own packaging, working with local manufacturers was really nice. And I think the world is only getting easier to make stuff anywhere. But for us, new to manufacturing, being able to visit the factories where our tools were hung and 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.

1:23:11And while we do the Polaroid externals are still manufactured here in Wisconsin, other things we manufacture elsewhere. But I think it was a unique opportunity to be able to see it in person. And yeah, I think it was, I think it helped us being where we were. Yeah, individuals are very much akin to working with their hands. And I think there's just, it's a very blue collar city, Milwaukee. So there's no shortage of people that are willing and ready to work and want to work hard and are just great to be around. And I think in that regard 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 you can grow in the right direction with.

1:24:11That's been a really the Midwest has been a really great place for us. Of course, we don't know because we haven't tried anywhere else. And, you know, I don't want to throw shade at any other state because I'm sure other places would be great to work in as well. But there's some advantages. There's also disadvantages. We're not in the greatest, like, space for shipping around, whether or not we're importing or we're just shipping to California, which a lot of our customers are in California or New York or Texas. So the Chicago orders are nice, but otherwise, you know, we're spending a decent amount on shipping.

1:24:52And 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 before this. It was like a 20 mile radius of everything was coming in. it wasn't even the cost that drove us away from using some of the local vendors. It was really about their ability to produce quality and consistency, volume, and sometimes not volume in the larger sense. We do a lot of small exclusives, and it's hard to find someone that wants to even bother quoting out something if it's only 500 units or 200 units. you can really get gobbled up quickly in your pricing and make it unaffordable for your buyer for the end consumer.

1:25:43So unfortunately, not all of our stuff is still made in the U.S. and we do have to import some of it. But whenever possible, we try to use U.S. suppliers. and when on top of that when possible we try to use people in the Milwaukee Metro cool way cool I should have asked earlier you guys moved to Milwaukee for grad school did I have that right or did you move after grad school and something else brought you there we're both from a town in Wisconsin called Appleton okay it's probably a city is it a city I don't know it's like two hours north of here so wisconsin is home we went to minnesota for god and then came home yeah to milwaukee for graduate school so this is this is still where our family is um i yeah i mean i think in terms of dreaming like we'd love to do retrospect la or retrospect new york and like try to make small versions of this especially when it comes to like we repair people can send and their own cameras and things of that nature, like have multiple locations.

1:26:57But yeah, for now, this is home and we're happy to be here. The second there's a retrospect to New York, I'm kicking down the door. Can we talk a little bit about your guys' space? Because on our last phone call, you mentioned that you have, what was the square footage, if you don't mind me asking? 15 ,000. And then we have a warehouse where we store, you know, like those cold storage items. So kind of dead stock inventory of like portable cassette players we can't do anything with at the moment. We'll go into a cold storage facility rather than renting out additional space that kind of makes sense for us.

1:27:44So, yeah, it's a pretty decent sized footprint. um we're like we could easily fill up 30 000 like it wouldn't be difficult whatsoever um we're we're very tightly packed uh right now and um it just comes down to where 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 developing products and iterating um our our devices and that that is where we decided to focus our time and attention on and we'll just make the best out of the space we have in the meantime. Can people come visit you should they have a reason? I believe on your website I saw that you have a small showroom now.

1:28:29Yeah, we do. The space we're renting now is perfectly set up for this little room in front where we showcase some of our stuff, especially people. We work with a local film lab to facilitate film processing just because they're a little farther west and we're closer to the metro part of the city. But yeah, people can pick up their orders here. They can shop our little selection. They can shop online and get something pulled up from the back. And we do, upon request, give tours if we're available. It's not a great shopping experience. I wouldn't recommend. Yeah, don't come shopping. Like, we have a lot of work to do there.

1:29:09It's definitely an active fun. If you ever are in the area, and especially if someone knows that they're going to be in the area and they want a tour, I've had people email our customer service team before. And if I'm not around or Core's not around, someone else will give them a tour. We love sharing what we do with people. We're very private about what we did initially when we only had one buyer and it was Polaroid. 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. So we're just this quiet business that just hummed along and supplied Polaroid stuff.

1:29:53and now since we are direct to consumer and B2B and have many other customers than just Polaroid we get to share what we do or we feel like there's value in sharing what we do and we're so excited to talk to people about it and to show people around our space so if there's any listeners out there in the Midwest that want to make a trip out here or plan to come to Milwaukee, feel free to reach out. Oh, that is so kind of you guys. I have a few more questions. Actually, I think I just have one, two more questions, and then we can put a bow on this. The first one is, in your words, according to your hearts, why is fighting this fight against obsolescence?

1:30:51so important we talked about this a little bit before i think i think we have similar answers too i i think the next generation is very hungry for tangible experiences so maybe this isn't a direct answer to obsolescence specifically sounds like it to me 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 and people give them a hard time for liking cassette tapes or liking vinyl like how incredible to be well-rounded 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 interesting when you really dive into the weeds of how it works.

1:31:44You know, we have this next generation growing up on screens where their phones fulfill all of those needs, photography, music. Those are kind of the main ones. And there's this whole generation that's 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, you know, sourcing it in mass, giving someone a slightly different experience than finding it on eBay and hoping it 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 this.

1:32:29I 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, we're friends with them too we are rewind is another one we we're gonna um be working with them soon on something they're technically our competitors but it's like the more the merrier right like putting these products out there um and yeah i think we just want to be a resource for people to have an analog experience yeah what i often think about is like leisure is not that old of a concept um mass production's not that old of a concept like consumer 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 now there's just now the consumers are deciding a little bit more and they're saying and there's access to a lot more of this stuff thanks to the internet and And I think it gives an opportunity for us to live in both worlds.

1:33:38And I'm not going to use my 35mm camera for every photo I take, but I'm going to use it for some of the really special, meaningful moments in my life. And just like I'm not going to listen to every single album on cassette. But, you know, if I'm at a concert and I don't want to carry around a record, it's much easier to support an artist by buying their cassette and you then have a souvenir from that experience and then you also get to relive that experience through tangible media and I think that's great and both can exist without conflict and and that's what's exciting to me and we want to be an entry point for people that have that curiosity and kind of be that just welcoming, friendly Midwestern company that is, you're not afraid to go in and ask silly questions.

1:34:40We've all started by asking silly questions and we really welcome that and want to serve that population of individuals, whether they're Gen Alpha or baby boomers. It doesn't matter to us. Yeah, 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 before we do go, if people want to find you guys, where can they find you? What do you want people to click? What do you want people to know this is your time to share anything that you would like to share oh thanks yeah retrospect.com 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 we haven't really dove into the tiktok world but maybe someday so instagram is where and honestly i still do a lot of the dm so um you can come talk to me there if want to um yeah we have you know if someone wanted to shop with us it would mean a lot if it was on our actual e-commerce website retrospect.com you 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 into coals 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 yeah certainly the the dot com 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 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 cory retrospect.com go check it out uh you will not be disappointed um thank you guys very much thank you so much appreciate it