What “repairable” actually means
A button you can sew back on is not the same as a product designed to be repaired. The difference is the whole game.
“Repairable” has quietly become a marketing word, and I want to take it back. When I stamp it on something in my shop, I mean a specific thing: that the object was designed, from the first sketch, to be opened, fixed, and closed again by an ordinary person with ordinary tools.
I restore and curate furniture in Stockholm. Most of what comes through my workshop was never built to be repaired — it was glued where it should have been jointed, stapled where it should have been screwed. You can save it, but you fight the design the whole way.
Can a stranger fix it without me?
That is the bar. Not whether a specialist can perform surgery, but whether the next owner — someone I will never meet — can keep the thing alive. Replaceable parts. Stitching instead of glue. Hardware you can source. A construction you can actually see.
A thing designed to be repaired is a thing designed to be kept. Everything else is designed to be replaced.
When you buy something repairable, you are not buying insurance against breakage. You are buying a longer relationship — the right to grow old alongside an object instead of cycling through its disposable cousins. That is the most sustainable thing a workshop can offer, and it almost never shows up on a spec sheet.
Written by
Greta Lindqvist
Greta's home · Stockholm, Sweden
Greta curates Greta's home on Étalys — a verified shop of ethically-made goods, each with traceable provenance you can question.