Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Retro Tech with Retrospekt!

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

We've got another mid-week bonus episode for you! This week, Ellis talks to the owners and founders of a company out of Milwaukee that is fighting to keep old tech alive. Retrospekt started out selling Polaroid cameras and quickly expanded to include all kinds of neat tech. It's definitely a fun conversation with people who are clearly passionate about what they do. Enjoy! Links:  Retrospekt: https://bit.ly/3UjukrD Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Socials: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. What is up, people of the internet? Welcome to the Waveform Podcast. I am your host today, Ellis Roven. I am joined by my co-hosts, Marques. And I'm David. Yeah, pretty weird, huh? So guys, we host a tech news show. We're covering what's new in tech. And as you may know from any of my trivia questions and random tangents, I love tech that is specifically not new.

And I also love 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 I found a bunch of VHS tapes I really liked on this cool site called Retrospect. And a lot of the time when you're buying things like, especially VCRs and CRTs, you are buying from an old guy in the middle of nowhere with a garage who just repairs this stuff and barely makes enough money to scrape by. And it's just sort of like a weird passion project. Best way to buy film cameras too, by the way. Right? Old guy in the Midwest

who doesn't know the value of what he's selling. I was thinking it was along the lines of like old guy whose 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 have to. All of this is true. All of this is true.

Totally. But so you can imagine my surprise when there's an 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 realize they don't just sell VHS tapes and VCRs and CRTs. They sell film cameras. They sell old digital cameras. 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 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- No relation. Yeah. We're going to let them explain it in their own words in the interview. But David, you avid,

you're an avid film photographer. You've heard of the impossible project. So the impossible project some odd years ago when Polaroid shut down their instant film operation and the factories were all closed and it became sort of impossible to get this film. A little project got started called the Impossible Project, where they would just acquire as many Polaroid cameras as they could, take whatever film was in there out of them, make sure the film was still good, bring the cameras back to life and sort of 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, Corey and Adam, really liked Polaroid cameras. When it all 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 with the Impossible Project, they became one of the Impossible Project's main suppliers. Makes sense. Yeah. And also a bunch of former Impossible Project employees now run a little shop called Brooklyn Film Camera, which is one of the best places to buy revamped Polaroid SX-70s. They're hardcore about fixing Polaroids. They're one of the only places in the United States that does it. And they're great. And I'll let them tell the rest of the story

of how this blossomed into this 40 person massive business. But I hope you guys enjoy this wild retro ride we're about to go on. Exciting. Richard Tech. So without further ado, I will let Adam roll the interview

and away we go. Through the magic of editing. 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 episode. But for now, we have another cool midweek bonus episode. And long-time 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 lot of room or space for me to do so. So amidst all of my crazy tape collecting, I came across a very cool website called retrospect.com, and I met the two very cool people who own this very cool website. And today we're going to talk all about tech that is disappearing from our lives and why it's cool and how to repair it and a whole bunch of really great stuff. So welcome, Corey and Adam. Thank you so much for inviting me. Of course. I'm so excited. As soon as I got the email back from you guys, I was like, yes!

So the way we like to kick these things off is if you 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? guys do? What's the pitch? So Retrospect is a consumer electronics company that specializes in a lot of retro tech. We both refurbish and restore some of the retro tech and we produce some of it. And then the third pillar is that we also sell other people's newly manufactured retro tech or things that are adjacent to it, such as music or film. Cool, cool, way cool. So how did this journey begin for you guys? Because I think, you know, we if you look through the internet, you go on eBay, Facebook marketplace, you'll see, you know, random guys in their basement putting together old VCRs and stuff like that. But you guys have this like

really comprehensive business that tackles a lot of avenues. So yeah, how did this get started? And then how did it get to where it is now? Yeah, good question. Our origin story is very much wrapped up in Polaroid story. And they have a great story, too. There's a lot of great documentaries about how Polaroid Corporation ended and seized their manufacturing of instant film and how this great company called The Impossible Project bought, miraculously, the last standing film factory in the Netherlands and kept the machines running to reproduce instant film as 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 mean i could talk about that forever um we were users of polaroid film and uh when polaroid stopped, they like abruptly announced the end of film manufacturing in like, what year? It was around 2005, but they still had some materials to make it for a couple of years. They had a sell-off plan. So what was happening on eBay and the like is people, suddenly like a pack of Polaroid instant film was like 30, 40 bucks on eBay, where historically, you know, in the 2000s, it was maybe $10. So we were users of instant film, super sad that film was disappearing. We heard about the impossible project early on. And

our solution for continuing to shoot film, were broke college students we could not afford the 30 ebay film our little hack was going to thrift stores and finding cameras that still had film inside uh and shooting what was left so you could get you know a polaroid camera at goodwill for a couple bucks it had five good shots left and that's what we would use and people were donating them in masses like I remember going to a thrift store and you could find like 10 Polaroid cameras on the shelf that is not true anymore um but what happened was we asked a giant collection of Polaroid cameras um and at that time Adam and I this is back when we were dating we're're now married. We moved to Milwaukee where we are now for graduate

school and we moved like bins and bins of cameras with us and decided that that was not something we wanted to have as a fixture in our home for 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 working with them directly to sell them what we call raw cameras. You know, we would just find them. They had flat fees for what they would charge to buy this vintage Polaroid 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 all over the United States to where it grew and grew to where, I don't know, there was a definitive point where it was more than a hobby. Yeah, around 2012, we found out we were the biggest global supplier for the Impossible Project for their hardware, their cameras.

And that just continued to develop. And yeah, I think at a point it went from like, how can we pay a couple of our bills? Like, it'd be great if I could cover my internet and my electric bill. bills. Like, it'd be great if I could cover my internet in my electric bill. And then suddenly, it was like, oh, I think I can pay this semester's tuition. And I think that's when it started becoming a little bit more real for us, that there's some business potential there. But we assumed it would just kind of fizzle out. And our goal was like, well, if we can get to a good point with our student loans by the time, you know, the impossible project stops buying these, we'll feel really satisfied. Yeah, but that 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 York, they were refurbishing them themselves and reselling them with their newly made Polaroid film. So we were supplying raw cameras. What eventually happened is we were, Adam and I were approached by their headquarters, which were in Berlin at the time, to take over the refurbishing and repair of the cameras. And 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 were very generous in providing us training from original Polaroid employees from the factory in the Netherlands.

original Polaroid employees from the factory in the Netherlands. They flew out and trained me and Adam and a few of our first staff members to do this. This is when Adam was done with grad school, I had just finished. We had to make a conscious decision to be like, okay, well, I guess we're not doing that. We're going to start this business instead, which was wild at the time, but in hindsight, so amazing. I feel really fortunate. It feels very serendipitous. We were very passionate and I think that's what they liked about us is our passion. We're huge Polaroid diehards. We're still collectors at heart and really love the product and the brand. Yeah. We had nothing to lose. 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 more like oh 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 opportunity to do something that um that it didn't feel like a door that was going to reopen. And it always felt like the career was a door that could reopen at any point. But it's definitely that was the point in which it became a business. We went from a proprietor, sole proprietor, to an LLC. We filed the the paperwork we named the company retrospect and hired hired staff so that deal wrapped up in early 2015 and um it really accelerated our business i mean it accelerated it to the point where it started it, and then really helped us grow from there. I'll let 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, but I think to skip past that and talk about, well, okay, clearly that's not all we have on our website now at a certain point and we still work very closely with polaroid we're licensees they're awesome they let us do a lot of really cool stuff i think we'll get into talking about what we do to those cameras which is a cool hybrid of like restoring the vintage eternal internals and and re-injection molding the externals and doing cool collaborations and partnerships. But we found it wise eventually to not have all of our eggs in one basket. And we had all of this intellect that we were gaining with our team

about how to repair 80s and 90s electronics. And we, as a phase phase two decided to pick another product to start refurbishing and that for us was sony walkmans um and since then it's just catapulted and and we have brought in newly manufactured things too like we're not selling used records. We sell newly pressed vinyl records, combination of new and old cassette tapes. A lot of the 35 millimeter products that we're putting out right now are newly manufactured. So just like anything that falls under the loose umbrella of retro, retro tech, retro tech inspired, Our site has kind of turned into like a more of like a lifestyle outfitters, one stop destination for all of these RetroTech things. Wow, that is so unbelievably fascinating.

Especially the fact that you guys got your start in sort of the procurement side of it all. Because as someone who's also obsessed with retro tech and 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 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 find a VCR in good shape. It can be so difficult to find a CRT where the flyback transformer isn't whining. There's all this stuff. So early on when you guys were collectors, before it was a business,

how were you actually getting these cameras what was the secret sauce it was just easier back then to be honest i mean you had craigslist facebook marketplace wasn't a thing at that point we're in minnesota too and the thrift circuit in minnesota was phenomenal yeah and it paired really nicely with Polaroid discontinuing their film and knowing who the Impossible Project was. And the Impossible Project, though they had an insurmountable task to overcome to create Polaroid film or Impossible film with the new formula. It was really challenging to use. So

even people using it weren't super thrilled about it. So there's just a lot of these cameras being donated. And that was the opportunity for us in which the volume was there to support what we were doing. What I've noticed now too is like, so around that time or maybe a little bit later, there was also like no shortage of point and shoot 35 millimeter cameras, like, you know, the Pentax, Minolta, like really nice stuff, like the stuff that you would maybe, I don't know, that my parents used in the

90s yeah and now that's 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 digital camera program you know early 2000s 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. So I think it 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 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 for bringing a program in is that it has to have been mass produced in some capacity because part of our repair and refurbishment process is really dependent on taking multiple parts and fusing it into one working part.

There's only so much we can do with like new components, which we do 3d printing, which we do um injection molding which we do if like the numbers can support it but um the ability to source quite a few models that at least the internals are the same and modular and then piece them back together that's really part of our criteria. Interesting. So for example, no, we don't do A-tracks. Not yet. Yet. I'm really glad you touched on that because that was pretty much where I wanted to go next. Before I jump into that, I just out of curiosity, what were you guys studying in grad school?

Oh, thanks for asking. I have my master's degree in speech language pathology. Yeah. And I have my master's of science in occupational therapy. Oh, okay. Wow. So I do see exactly what you meant when you were like, you can always go back to those careers, but you had this like wonderful opportunity to do this. That is so interesting. Yeah. And we picked the careers, we both have psychology undergrads, and we got done with school in 2012, and it was competitive to get a job at Starbucks. We're still recovering from that financial collapse. We had friends that had great degrees that couldn't get jobs, and we just felt like, how do we delay going into the workforce a little bit longer until things kind of resolve

um and delay our student loans being due so you go to grad school yeah well and i agree if you if you're clever about it you pick things that you don't need to do a bunch of prereqs for that you have you know mild interest in and um and that time, it was very much the people that had skills were getting jobs. So you really wanted a specific skill that you could go into the workforce with. So that's what stimulated that decision for us. And out of all the things we do, we want to do it with a lot of passion and excitement. And of course, one can do that with their education, but it kind of also felt like a compromise at the same time of working in those fields, because it just felt like, you know, what was the right thing to do, but not necessarily that thing you wanted to do. Yeah. No, I totally, you know, it's funny. I actually really not to talk too much about

myself here, but I can really identify with that. I graduated college, uh, within like three or four months of like COVID really going into full swing. So it was very clear immediately out of school, I was not doing anything career wise. And especially since I had graduated with a degree in music, which nothing like that was happening. And I fell into podcasting sort 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 really interested in. And lo and behold, it actually led me here, which is very nice. But thank you for sharing that about you guys. I have a few more sort of Midwest core questions for you guys coming later.

But I want to talk about 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, getting posted on the website and ending up in a consumer's hand. So like, what state are you finding these things in? How much love do they actually need? Is it different device by device? Yeah, the whole the whole cycle. need? Is it different device by device? Yeah, the whole cycle. It varies based on the product, but whatever we were able to come up with for refurbishment and repair process for Polar Canvas early on has been largely replicable for other products. And we've looked at and studied and come up with quality assurance measures and have very formal documentations and processes

and checks that these things go through. And by the way, we carry a warranty too because there's some just unpredictable things that can happen with these items. They're super fragile. I think the SX-70 folding Polaroid camera is a great example. These cameras came out in 1972.

We're not making new parts. We are opening them up, servicing them, and putting them back together and trying to make good, judicious decisions about what to replace, what still has life in it, what's cosmetically okay, what we want to update or replace with other parts. Yeah, I think things come up in pretty scary conditions, but depending on with the Polaroid cameras, we have the ability to reshell the external. So cosmetics aren't a big deal. Like I touched on earlier, because we try to source things that were mass produced. expecting yield loss and you know what's broken on one isn't broken on another and we can take them apart put them together steal this part from the pcb put it on this part i step like that so um but it really it varies on the product and we have so many different product groups now for refurbished stuff um yeah yeah i would say the ideal is we source things that no one wants and that are destined for landfill.

And we are putting time and energy into it to save it and make it useful. Because there's not a whole lot of value in a company just going online and buying things at work and charging more for it to that consumer because they put a warranty and they clean it. That is not interesting to us. charging more for it to then consumer because they put a warranty and they clean it. That is not interesting to us. And I'm sure there's a business model out there for plenty and that's fine. It's just not how we're interested in running our business. So whenever possible, we want items like that in which unless a technician opens it up and services it, it's not usable. Is there like a too far gone?

Like, do you see things where you're like, no, that's not coming back? Rust. Rust is a big one. Yeah, I think one, we had a Nasik 70 once that I swear was in a house fire. I think we just kept it. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was special in that way.

Yeah. So rest is a big one. Obviously can be a problem, especially with human health in general. But then with cameras, the lenses, you often want to avoid mold. But our team also can take apart lenses and clean them too. So we do that process on moldy lenses also. So even mold to some extent, if it's in the lens, isn't always a problem. I think another challenge is plastic ages and gets brittle.

Or as we all know, with more white-toned plastics, they yellow with UV damage. That is not fixable. We do have a full paint booth, though. That was another avenue that we explored to try to continue to save some of this stuff and not throw it away is refinishing it and um that was an interesting step to like build out this whole like professional paint booth it's really fun like it's really cool i yeah we probably could do more with that and probably will over time but um yeah there's we're always thinking of new ways to save things. Yeah, the paint booth is a whole different tangent too, because that really goes into we have it for the Polar cameras, the custom ones that are injection molded because, well,

a camera is a mobile darkroom and well, instant camera is and not all colors you run are light tight so um we have a paint booth actually to uh paint the inside cavities black uh of most of our most of our cameras like when we first started manufacturing externals we learned that plastic is translucent if it's colored um and then they were all light leaking and so we coat the internals with a light tight coating yeah yeah we um we were working with the engineering firm that helped put together some of Polaroid's cameras um in the 90s and worked at 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 we're like great and they're like here's the spots you need to worry about and then we got 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're really panicking about what to do because we spent a lot of time and money on the tools and on the plastic and we had purchase orders for the colored program that we were doing. But it caused some really cool innovation on our end. Painting inside of a cavity is miserable. So there's a lot of, you know, it creates so much turbulence and overspray. So getting that dialed in really took a long time. But now we have a really good process for it. We have a full booth and we have 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, ground in, like painting the inside of a cavity. Do you find 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 too.

Yeah, we typically, I mean, sometimes we should go online sooner than what we do. But, you know, we often just try to troubleshoot it and problem solve it. I think, you know, the higher education in general, a four-year or a master's degree just teaches you how to critically think through situations. And, you know, the scientific process is applicable every single day in the work that we do. So you just start thinking critically about it and figure out what's going to work. You talk to people. And then, of course, if you're like Corey and you're significantly smarter than me, you'll go online and look at other resources. and look at other resources. There's no shortage of amazing information on the internet that people put out there for free

about how to refurbish and repair things. I'm sure we've looked at a lot of it. A lot of it's developed internally. We have an amazing repair team with a lot of incredible knowledge that they've brought to the company. But yeah, for sure. We're watching YouTube videos too. It's funny that you guys bring that up because in my time of dealing with all this sort of retro tech stuff, I also spent a lot of time on these forums and I've noticed that

there's a clear like emotional difference between people who are more casual collectors and then the people who are actually keeping this and then the people who are actually keeping this stuff alive. Where like in Walkman forums, for example, you'll still see people are like, oh, you have this model. You don't have the mega base. Oh, what are you doing without a direct drive? Like loser. You know what I mean? And then as soon as you go to the forum where people are actually 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 CRT repair forums.

Yeah, it's great. It is great. It's such a great group of people. Support for this podcast comes from Huntress. If you're a small business owner, Thank you. is where fully managed cybersecurity meets human expertise. They offer a revolutionary approach to managed security that isn't all about tech. It's about real people providing real defense. When threats arise or issues occur, their team of seasoned cyber experts is ready 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for support. They provide real-time protection for endpoints, identities, and employees, all from a single dashboard. It's because their cutting-edge solutions are backed by experts who

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Welcome back. Still Waveform Podcast. Marques, 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 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... That counts. Adam shot with that camera for a long time 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 hit so for those

that don't know do you know what hit clips are 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 Tom 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 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 were yeah we're just like the

big chorus and like the tick tock yeah so like see how good you kids have it before you go on itunes and buy an individual song yeah oh 60 seconds 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.

Which is just insane. It was more than just media you would listen to. 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 listened to this it's like the the really retro version of like the song that plays on is it myspace that did that where the song is playing and you're like oh that's part of who they are exactly whatever i see yeah that's cool now we just have the weird like thing on tinder and you're like, oh, that's part of who they are. Exactly. 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. You link your Spotify and it just exposes you for who you really are. Oh, gosh. Dang. Anyway, so we're going to keep talking about RetroTech

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. They 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 yeah i did not know that

anyway yeah in this next portion of the interview uh i nerd out with cory 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 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. Should I ask the pin? I was wondering what the pin would say is the difference between a two head and a three head. Is it similar to a four head? What's the difference between a two head and three head cassette tape player oh no finding tape player info it's a good sign it'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. So 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. If people want to know more, they 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. Now 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 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, Tanoshan, I actually don't know how to say it, went out of business 10 or so years ago. So where do you guys like, are you reinventing the wheel here? Have you found some random factory in in china or taiwan that still make like what 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 um i guess i'll start with your last question um 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. As 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're able to adjust it further even still the quality is so hard to get right out of the factory 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 to get the tuning as precise as we want it to because their standard deviation we don't feel like is acceptable. We have to adjust the playhead or the azimuth quite frequently with them. We have to do a lot of other internal 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 and 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. The 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 dipping our toes was with the Sony refurbishment process, and that was doing really well. 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 exactly working to our specifications and that communication is strong

before we really go big and have like a larger program that might be in more mass retail. And 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. You know, 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, you know, multi-tool cavities pumping these things out, and they're awesome. So we're in our infancy of trying to fill the void. There's clearly a demand for things like cassette tapes, which is awesome. 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. segmented is you know the the thing we can always have in stock and have a a good quality performance

is our cp81 and then if you really want um a nostalgic experience um uh with the you know in our opinion the best uh consumer electronic uh the consumer experience of the uh portable cassette player then you have a sony um which 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 um we're like you know we're kind of it's 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 oh my god i think people are you know and also like so i i'm sure our listeners always know this already knows because i never

shut up about it but i have a 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 like over and over and over again and never really like 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, you know, and the mixing mastering engineers, I think, you know, sort of plan for that. One record for me is the

Springsteen Welcome to ashbury park like i listened to that over and over again and never gotten it and then i got it on cassette was like yes this is so great um 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 odds that the CP82 has a three head mechanism? Oh, probably not. Yeah, probably not. That might be at 83 or 84. Totally. 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. And what we want to do is big. What we can do is small.

It's owned by Corey and myself. We have no other investors. We have no venture capital. It's us two, And this is, this is it. It started with that small investment of, um, uh, by us too, 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 bit inside 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 than try to explain to investors why we should make something with a certain way,

even though the average consumer might not care or appreciate it. So it causes this slower pace to iteration for product development that we're not always super enthusiastic about but it um 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 and you know uh have a really nice business yeah that 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 they're micro trends like i feel like um the digital cameras and ipods are maybe a little

bit of a trend but i 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 tech and they will keep coming through the door um and we're here to like service uh provide an experience for them so like i felt like a natural question to that was maybe like well what if the 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. So. And, and the,

the reason I asked about the three head players specifically is because the, the, I got into, sorry about the mic there. I got into cassette when I was mic 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 record head and then immediately hit the play head and go back out. And so, uh, man, I had a little mini three head player that I could use both in my music studio.

And there's a pretty big musician that, um, man, a little mini three head player that I could use both in my music studio. There's a pretty big musician that their manager contacted us about doing a cassette player with, and they know cassettes very well and it didn't, didn't get off the ground because it wasn't exactly that a three head. So 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 like 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, they're the guys. Does that happen a lot? Yeah. Most of our opportunities are organic. Um, we had to wear a lot of hats, 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 have people in seats that are just there to reach out and to collaborate and hopefully make something happen. So oftentimes we have people come into 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, you know,

dozens of people and you hear back from one or two. And that's, you have to be, you have to be okay 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. It's hard to say no. It's hard to say no. We get a lot of requests from prop houses, from... Oh, I bet. Like, we need it tomorrow at 10am,

please, can you send this? It's fascinating. Our products have been in a few TV shows, but not like branded placements, just like, oh yeah, we have this old thing. Well, if you need a specific model of something so that it's period correct, I genuinely don't know where else you'd source one that you knew was going to work if you needed it to. 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. So 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,

they're having this resurgence. Actually, just today 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 a bunch 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 some of them are like smart media and you can only get like vintage cards. And we put together the entire kits. We do all the testing on them. But yeah, typically if it's not working there's you

can figure out the board that's not working on it and if you have a replacement one you can swap them but you're you're doing a lot of swaps rather than actual repairs and in some ways that makes it easier and other ways it makes it miserable yeah you get 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, which is almost never going to be lucrative for us unless we have like a huge demand. Yeah, it's definitely like just kind of making it an easy experience for someone to get into.

I think camcorders is another one that's 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 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're like all the broken ones just get like stored in storage be like our hoarders and keep everything and 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 uh then it 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 kind of our cold storage uh 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. And if we simply remade this, we sell them at $100 a piece, and if it costs X amount of dollars to remake this part and all this time to repair it, then now suddenly it's a viable endeavor for us to reverse engineer and remanufacture a certain component. So we've done that plenty of times on products as well, where there's just one

thing that continues to fail. And it's the best and the worst all at the same time. 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 always has this one thing that goes wrong? Because then you can't simply swap out stuff. You can't really bring your loss down until you have a replacement component for it. Did you say 5,000 units in stock? Is that actually what some of your stock of these items look like? I mean, our portable cassette players?

Yeah, we probably have a couple thousand. Yeah, I mean, you have to source a lot of these. I think the Sony Sports Watch. 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 yeah 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 don't have the replacement components for where 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 like didn't like 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 parts um but a

lot of them um it's like that part belongs to that line specifically and if you it makes it really hard to say well we need new motors for these and um 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 quantity is 10 000 okay well whatever we'll get to well 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 Polaroid 600 cameras on the other hand are like they're so modular they were designed to just

change like the external like cosmetic appearance but the internals largely stayed the same and yeah it made it really easy for us to reverse engineer the external moldings well yeah and it goes into the the entire point of the Polaroid camera was to sell the film um uh so it's like making a printer 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 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 yeah they're very very modular and a very nice product to start with uh 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.

And yeah, so that experience then can kind of catapult us into some of these other products. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite. Anxious about where the economy is headed? You're not alone. If you ask nine experts, you're likely to get 10 different answers. So unless you're a fortune teller and it's perfectly okay that you're not, nobody can say for certain.

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what you're doing right now, but with bottomless bevies on a beach in paradise. With Sunwing's big Boxing Week savings, you can choose between literally hundreds of all-inclusive vacation packages that offer big value for low prices. Take it from us. We've been here since last year's sale. Hey, get away from my fries. Oh yeah. Book with your local travel advisor or at Welcome back to the Waveform podcast. You're catching us mid-interview with Corey and Adam from Retrospect. This 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... Wisconsin. Wisconsin. Fear the deer. But 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. They have a warehouse with tens of thousands of Walkmans. This operation, you think of RetroTech as being a really niche

hobby. And then the scale that Corey and Adam have built their business to is 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. So 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 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? Like 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, um, a replacement board, uh, from a manufacturer and just replace it. 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 but from our uh vantage point where we're sitting right now they're they're both they pose their their unique challenges in their own way um their unique challenges in their own way, we're just more comfortable in the space that we're in. Right. Because we have experience doing 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, 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 10th of an RPM off from that speed, you have no picture. Like,

like, like the VCR literally does not work. Um, and it sounds, it, it feels crazy to say out loud, like, yes,

it's easier to maintain that 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. 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 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 we 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 so wait they're all i know i might have to go buy one um that is so dope but yes also i actually i just i should say that before i hurt someone don't open any electronic that you don't know you're doing but especially the three 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 unplugged anyway sorry sorry did not mean to interrupt you but thank you i think yes yes i make sure everyone's getting the right message here yeah um and some of the smaller electronics the polar cameras they have a little capacitor 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 that you started talking about the people because um 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 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, there's people in this room with us right now, just working about their jobs. Yeah, 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 like a small team of business people? Is it mostly people on the business side and then a small repair team? What is, what's it looking like? What did we come up with? We, yeah, we were looking at the list before the, uh, the call. Um, it's like 50, 50.

Yeah. There's about, do you say there's 10 people in this room or like yeah 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. And 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 um of 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. We're only going to get one of those.

There's only one. We're not going to restock it. And then that skew lives on Shopify forever. Right. But you simply can't, you can't send that all to a third-party fulfillment center and expect it to be affordable or done as well as we believe we can do it here. And making sure that people get the right items and that it all comes together, etc. So that takes, I don't know, that's five to seven people that work on the customer service.

So maybe 10 repair refurbishment people. Well, 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. the quality inspections. 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 hardware to take the camera apart. And that has a bunch of glue on it. And you have to scrape all that off by hand and you have to polish all the chrome and clean it. And it's such a pain in the rear. So there's a lot of supporting individuals that work on the testing and cleaning prior to repair or post-repair or both. Packaging. Yeah, packaging. 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? 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 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 integral to building this business with us and really invested in learning how to repair the complex Polaroid cameras and has like written his own, their top secret, but

like repair books that 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. And 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. That might be an overgeneralization. Yeah. Yeah. And we're actually looking at it too because we don't pay a ton of attention to it, but it's actually a 50-50 male-to-female ratio on the repair technicians as well. And traditionally, when we put up repair technician jobs, I don't know that we've ever had a woman

apply to that position. And there's no reason not you know that yeah skill sets are all the same across whatever you identify as for your gender and yeah so I think that also keeps a really nice balance for the company as a whole and 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. We comprise refurbishment of like the cosmetic cleaning component of it and making it cosmetically acceptable and repairs repairing it. Typically the person who's polishing it isn't the person who's fixing the actual mechanical problems. Yeah, naturally when it's being repaired if it's an internal cleanliness, the repair technician needs to clean it. But so much of the tech, it's really dirty and really gross and it takes us a long time to clean it up and you want technicians that really have a passion for that, are detail oriented, and they port over really nicely for then repair technicians. And often the refurb technicians are also doing 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, 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 seat and able to kind of fix this and you don't know why it matters uh so that's been a really um uh interesting uh development in our learning as just two kids that are running a company and trying to figure out how to uh excite and motivate and hire the right people that 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, but 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 in the Q-tip. You know what I mean? I know what it takes to clean this stuff and you you love it when you when you've taken all the

knobs off and you've cleaned in every crevice you love the thing that you just cleaned and sort of to heal it would be so emotionally fulfilling wow yeah yeah it for the right people they super enjoy it yeah well in 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 that 670 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. We look at those metrics and we look at how to lower them constantly and make sure that consumers have the best experience possible with the device 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 or do you need separate casts of characters to get this stuff done i love the juxtaposition um the watch our mechanical watches we work with one of our buddies here in milwaukee who super cool justin brock is his name he is comes from a family his dad's a jeweler he repairs those so that's kind of like a side collaboration thing we 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. He actually has a watchmaker that services all of them.

So Justin really focuses on the $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 watches. So he's kind of offloading his inventory. He's like, well, these are cool. I really like these. But 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. So... 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. So 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 variety to the job too, if we can. Sometimes it's not possible or there isn't time or personnel available for cross-training, but it is definitely the goal to cross-train. Yeah, to 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. People, like you said, they fall in love with these products too. And you learn something 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. Our 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. 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 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, defined that begins somewhere around Ohio and ends somewhere around Iowa, maybe? Does that sound right to you guys? All I know is 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. 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? I 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, it's 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 um and while we don't we do uh the polaroid externals are still manufactured here in wisconsin um other things we manufacture elsewhere but um

it i think it was a unique opportunity to be able to see it in person and yeah i i i think it was And yeah, 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 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, 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, we're spending a decent amount on shipping. we're spending a decent amount on shipping 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 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. 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 and consumer. So unfortunately, not all of our stuff is still made in the U S um, and we do have to, um, uh, import, uh, some of it, but, uh, whenever possible, we,

we try to use us, uh, 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. 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 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 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 in their own cameras and things of that nature, have multiple locations. But 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 how what was the square footage if you don't mind me asking 15 000 and then we have um a um uh a warehouse where we store you know like those cold storage items so uh kind of dead stock inventory um of like portable set 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. So yeah, it's a pretty decent sized footprint. We're like, we could easily fill up 30,000. It wouldn't be difficult whatsoever.

We're very tightly packed right now. And 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 our devices? And 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. Yeah, 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. Um, and we do upon request, give tours if we're available. Um, it's not a great shopping experience. I wouldn't recommend like,

uh, we, we have a lot of work to do there. Um, but if you, if you ever are in the area and, uh, especially if someone knows that they're going't be in the area and they want a tour i've had people email 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 we love

sharing what we do with 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. And 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 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 so important? We talked about this a little bit before. I think we have similar answers, too. 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. answer to obsolescence specifically. Sounds like it to me. Well, okay. Why is what we're doing important? You know, and I feel very defensive of Gen Z or now Gen Alpha when 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 um you know we have this next generation growing up on 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 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 what our angle is. And yeah, as long as there's someone, and there's, by the way, we're not the only ones doing 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 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. 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 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

to a lot more of this stuff thanks to the internet. And I think it gives an opportunity for us to live in both worlds. And I'm not going to use my 35 millimeter 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 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 that's what's excited 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. We've all started by asking silly questions and we really welcome that and want to serve that population of individuals, whether they're 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 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. We hang out on Instagram the most.

Sadly, 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 gm so um you can come talk to me there if you 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 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 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, Corey, Retrospect.com. Go check it out. You will not be disappointed. Thank you guys very much, Adam, Corey, retrospect.com. Go check it out. You will not be disappointed. Thank you guys very much.

Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you.