Marginally Better S01E17: The Repair Relationship Revolution

A century ago, companies deliberately made products that wouldn’t last. Today, that model is being dismantled—by regulators, by consumers, and by a new generation of businesses built around repair, not replacement.

In this episode of Marginally Better, Joe Taylor, Jr. explores the repair relationship revolution—from sweeping right-to-repair laws reshaping global manufacturing to companies like Framework and Lodge building loyalty through products designed to last. It’s a story about more than hardware—it’s about how fixing what’s broken can create stronger customer relationships than replacing what works, and why the future belongs to businesses that design for longevity, trust, and connection.

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Joe Taylor, Jr: In December of 1924, executives from General Electric, Philips, Osram, and France’s Compagnie des Lampes met in Geneva, Switzerland. They incorporated something called the Phoebus Cartel. And they signed a contract that said one thing: we’re going to make our lightbulbs worse.

Before the meeting, a household lightbulb burned for fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred hours. After the meeting, the cartel set the standard at one thousand. They tested every member’s bulbs. They fined any manufacturer whose product lasted too long.
That’s where planned obsolescence comes from. A signed contract. A room full of executives. One city in Switzerland.

A hundred years later, the contract has been quietly torn up. Today on Marginally Better — a laptop company whose customers are building its replacement parts. A cookware company whose product hasn’t materially changed since the McKinley administration. And a European law that — in three months — is going to make every manufacturer on Earth tell you exactly how to repair the thing they sold you.

That’s all coming up, after the break, on Marginally Better.
[Theme music.]

Announcer: From the global headquarters of Johns and Taylor in beautiful New Jersey, it’s Marginally Better. Here’s your host, Joe Taylor, Jr.

Joe Taylor, Jr: Welcome to Marginally Better, a show about business, innovation, and the American economy. I’m Joe Taylor Jr.

Something is shifting in how products get made — and who gets to fix them when they break. And the companies still operating like it’s 1924 are about to find out the hard way.

Let’s start in Oregon — the state that just quietly broke a hundred years of industry practice.
On January 1st, 2025, Oregon’s Senate Bill 1596 took effect. The law, signed by Governor Tina Kotek the previous March, requires manufacturers to provide owners and independent repair shops with the documentation, parts, and tools they need to fix consumer electronics. That part is similar to right-to-repair laws that have already passed in Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, and Colorado.

But Oregon did something nobody else had done. It banned parts pairing. That’s the practice — and according to the law firm Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren, Oregon is the first state to outlaw it — where manufacturers use software to lock components to a specific device. So when you replace a screen or a battery with a genuine part, the device refuses to fully work until the manufacturer authorizes it.

The law took effect this past January. Enforcement begins in 2027. And it’s already changing how manufacturers design products that ship into Oregon — which, in practice, means how they design products everywhere.

While Oregon was setting the floor, the European Union was building the ceiling.
Directive 2024/1799 — known as the Right to Repair Directive — entered into force in July of 2024. Member states have until July 31st of this year to transpose it into national law. So in three months, twenty-seven countries are going to require manufacturers to make repairs available, affordable, and easier than throwing the product away.

The directive does three things. It creates a repair obligation for specific product categories — phones, washing machines, vacuum cleaners — including making spare parts and repair information available. It amends consumer law to incentivize repair over replacement, even after the warranty expires. And it requires manufacturers to design products with repairability in mind from the start.

That last part is the one that matters. The European market is too big to design around. So products built for Europe will increasingly become products built for everyone. The Brussels Effect — applied to the back of your laptop.

Now here’s the company you wouldn’t expect on this list. For fifteen years, Apple built some of the most repair-hostile devices on the planet. Glued-in batteries. Pentalobe screws. Software that bricked the device if you replaced the wrong component with the wrong part. iFixit gave the iPhone a repairability score of one out of ten for years.

And then, slowly, Apple started walking it back. The Self Service Repair program launched in 2022. In June of 2023, Apple eliminated parts pairing for selected components. In April of 2024, the company announced it would support the use of genuine used parts in repairs. And as of fall 2025, calibration for those parts now happens on-device, after installation — instead of requiring a remote authorization from Apple.

In October of 2025, Apple expanded Self Service Repair to the iPhone 17 lineup. By April of this year, parts for the iPhone 17e and the M4 iPad Air are in the store. According to Apple’s own product pages, you can now order display, battery, camera, enclosure, and logic board components for almost every iPhone model from the last five years.

This is not because Apple woke up one morning and discovered virtue. This is because the regulatory environment changed faster than Apple’s product roadmap, and the company is now adapting in plain sight. Which tells you everything you need to know about where the wind is blowing.

Last story, and it’s the one that explains why every government on Earth is suddenly interested in repair.

The Global E-waste Monitor — published by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and the International Telecommunication Union — found that the world produced sixty-two million metric tons of electronic waste in 2022. That’s the most recent verified number. Up eighty-two percent from 2010. On track to hit eighty-two million tons by 2030.

Less than a quarter of that — twenty-two-point-three percent — was documented as properly collected and recycled.

Here’s the part that should make every CFO in America sit up. The raw materials in that e-waste — the gold, copper, palladium, rare earths — were valued at ninety-one billion dollars. Only nineteen billion was recovered. The world threw away seventy-two billion dollars in extractable resources, in a single year, because the products weren’t designed to give them back.
Right to repair isn’t a hippie movement anymore. It’s a balance sheet problem. And the regulators have noticed.

Four stories. Same direction. The laws are tightening. The biggest market in the world is requiring repairability in three months. Even Apple is yielding. And the cost of disposability is starting to show up in places nobody can ignore.

But while regulators have been writing the new rules, a small set of companies have been ignoring the old ones for years — and growing faster than any of their disposable competitors.
After the break, the story of one of them. A laptop company that nearly didn’t exist. A founder who spent his whole career inside the disposable economy and decided to build the opposite. And a community that turned a sketchy business plan into one of the most interesting hardware companies in America. That’s after the break, on Marginally Better.

It’s Marginally Better. I’m Joe Taylor Jr.

In late 2019, Nirav Patel sat down to write a business plan that no rational venture capitalist was going to fund.

Patel was thirty-six years old. He’d spent his career inside the consumer electronics machine. Engineering at Apple. Hardware at Oculus, where he led the team that built the original Rift and stayed through the Facebook acquisition. He had every reason in the world to start another well-trod startup — a chip company, a peripheral, an enterprise SaaS play.

Instead, he wrote a plan to start a laptop company.

Now, if you’ve ever spent ten minutes around a venture capitalist, you know the rule. You don’t get into laptops. The market is dominated by four giants — Lenovo, HP, Dell, and Apple — that ship roughly two hundred and fifty million units a year between them. Margins are razor-thin. Distribution is brutal. The components come from the same Asian supply chain everyone else uses. There is no plausible business case for a new entrant. Every laptop startup of the last twenty years had failed.

Patel’s pitch was even worse than a generic laptop company. He wanted to build a laptop you could repair. A laptop you could upgrade. A laptop where every component — the keyboard, the screen, the battery, the ports, the mainboard — was modular, user-replaceable, and shipped with a screwdriver in the box.

He was, in other words, proposing to start a laptop company with the explicit goal of selling fewer laptops to each customer.

You can see why the meetings did not go well at first.

But there was something Patel had seen at Oculus that the venture capitalists had not. He’d watched a generation of hardware engineers go to work every day knowing that the products they built would be obsolete in eighteen months. Not because the technology demanded it. Because the business model demanded it. The ports would change. The connectors would shift. The battery would be glued in. And somewhere around month thirteen of ownership, the customer would start hearing the soft, persuasive whisper of an upgrade cycle.

Patel had decided, in the language of his own blog post, that this wasn’t a technology problem. It was a values problem. And values problems, it turns out, are exactly the kind of problem you can build a company around — if you can find the right thousand customers.

The Framework Laptop 13 shipped in July of 2021. It was, in physical terms, a thirteen-inch ultraportable. Magnesium chassis. Intel processor. Standard memory and storage. From the outside, it looked like every other premium laptop in its price range.

But every part of it was designed to come apart. The keyboard popped out. The screen unclipped. The mainboard could be swapped out and reused as a desktop computer. Every internal component had a QR code printed on it that linked, when you scanned it, directly to a replacement part on Framework’s online store. The base model came with a screwdriver in the box. The repair manuals were free, online, and written in plain English.

And then Framework did something that hardware companies don’t do. They published the CAD files. The specifications for the expansion cards — the modular ports that slide into the laptop’s bays — were released publicly. Any third-party developer could build their own.

The community took the offer. Within months, hardware hackers were posting pictures of expansion cards Framework had never built — Ethernet ports, GPIO breakout boards, even an expansion card that turned a port into a small NVMe storage drive. The Framework subreddit became a forum for hardware engineering. Customers were not just repairing the product. They were extending it.
This was the part that the venture capitalists had missed. Patel hadn’t just built a laptop. He’d built an ecosystem in which the customer became a co-developer. Every modular port was a small invitation to participate. And the specific kind of person who responds to that invitation — the engineer, the IT lead, the Linux user, the parent buying a kid’s first computer — turns out to be exactly the kind of person whose word-of-mouth carries weight.

By the time Framework raised its Series A in 2022 — eighteen million dollars led by Spark Capital — the company had a real installed base, a real third-party ecosystem, and a customer satisfaction profile that looked unlike anything else in the laptop industry. Not because the laptop was better than a Dell. Because the relationship was.

Five years in, Framework is doing the thing that disposable companies cannot do. It is compounding. In 2024, the company raised another eighteen million dollars — a Series A-1, again led by Spark Capital, with participation from Buckley Ventures, Anzu Partners, Cooler Master, and Pathbreaker Ventures. As part of that round, Framework reserved a million dollars for what it called a community round — one hundred accredited investors, ten thousand dollars each, drawn from the customer base. The customers, in other words, were now also shareholders.

In February of 2025, Framework expanded the platform. They announced the Framework Laptop 12 — a twelve-point-two-inch convertible aimed at students. They announced the Framework Desktop, a Mini-ITX form factor built around an AMD Strix Halo processor. And they refreshed the Laptop 16 with NVIDIA RTX 50-series graphics, Wi-Fi 7, and an updated cooling system that — and this is the important part — fits into the same chassis the original Laptop 16 customers already own.
Six months ago, Framework held what it called its Next-Gen event and unveiled its 2026 lineup. The Framework Laptop 13 Pro. New mainboards. New expansion cards. And — this matters — every one of those upgrades fits into the laptops the company sold five years ago.

Think about what that means. A customer who bought a Framework Laptop 13 in 2021 can, in 2026, swap in a new processor, a new screen, new ports, and effectively own a brand-new computer. The chassis they paid for is still in service. The keyboard they got used to is still under their fingers. The relationship has compounded.

Now compare that to the relationship a customer has with a four-year-old MacBook. The battery health is degraded. The ports are obsolete. The newest macOS update has quietly told the customer that this hardware is no longer supported. The relationship hasn’t compounded. It’s depreciated.

This is the thing the venture capitalists missed in 2019. Patel didn’t pitch a hardware company. He pitched a customer relationship company. And in a market where every other laptop maker is racing to manufacture the shortest possible relationship, a company designed for a long one has very little competition.

The thesis holds in the numbers. According to Framework’s own disclosures, every Series A round has been oversubscribed. The community round filled in days. Reviews from PCWorld, TechSpot, and a long list of reviewers who tracked the product over multiple years all point to the same finding — the longer customers own the product, the more loyal they become.

That is not a feature of the laptop market. It is a feature of one company in the laptop market. And the rest of the industry is going to spend the next five years either copying it or losing to it.

So if Framework just rewrote the rules of a hundred-billion-dollar industry — a hundred and twenty-five years after the Phoebus Cartel set the original terms — you might assume the playbook is new.

It isn’t. There’s a company in southeastern Tennessee that has been running this exact strategy since the year 1896. And the only thing that’s changed is who else is paying attention.

In 1896, a man named Joseph Lodge built a foundry in South Pittsburg, Tennessee — a town of about three thousand people on the Tennessee River, west of Chattanooga. The product was simple. Cast iron skillets, Dutch ovens, griddles. Heavy. Black. Made for a wood stove.

A hundred and thirty years later, Lodge Cast Iron is still in South Pittsburg. Still family-owned — fifth generation now, with Bob Kellerman as chairman and Henry Lodge as president. Still operating the same kind of foundry on, more or less, the same patch of ground. The company runs two foundries today. The second one opened in 2017 and added seventy-five percent capacity. In 2021, Lodge announced a fifty-six-million-dollar expansion that’s adding two hundred and thirty-nine new jobs in a town with about three thousand residents.

That’s the company. Now here’s the customer relationship. According to a profile in Family Business Magazine, Lodge’s product return rate is roughly three one-hundredths of one percent. For every thirty-three thousand skillets that leave the foundry, one comes back. The company that has been selling, more or less, the same product for a hundred and thirty years has the lowest return rate of any cookware manufacturer I have ever found data on.

There’s more. According to reporting in The Bitter Southerner and Style Blueprint, Lodge customers routinely own product that’s older than they are. Skillets passed down at weddings. Dutch ovens older than the Federal Reserve. The company’s archives include letters from customers describing pans that survived house fires, foreclosures, two world wars, and the Great Depression — and which still got used last Sunday to cook breakfast.

Here’s the part that connects Lodge to Framework, and both of them to the future every right-to-repair regulator is trying to legislate into existence. Lodge customers don’t just buy. They evangelize. They give cast iron as a wedding gift. They teach their kids how to season a pan. They post pictures on Reddit of the skillet they inherited from their grandmother, with three generations of seasoning baked into it. The product is also the marketing. The customer is also the missionary.

Framework customers do the same thing. They post upgrade pictures. They share repair tips. They build expansion cards in their basements and post the schematics. The product is also the marketing. The customer is also the missionary.

This is what I’m calling the missionary economy. And the rule of the missionary economy is straightforward — when a product earns its place in someone’s life, when it becomes physically embedded in their kitchen or their workflow, the customer becomes a free, durable, self-replicating salesforce that no advertising budget can match.

Now flip the coin. If your product is designed to be replaced, your customer relationship is also designed to be replaced. Every transaction has to be re-earned. Every renewal is a fresh acquisition cost. Every upgrade cycle is a fresh chance for the customer to defect to a competitor. The disposable model isn’t just bad for the planet. It’s bad for the balance sheet — because the math of customer acquisition cost gets uglier every year, while the math of customer lifetime value gets shorter.

The Phoebus Cartel was, in business terms, a technology that worked. It cut bulb life by sixty percent. It expanded the replacement market. It generated, by some estimates, billions of dollars in additional sales in the years it operated. And then it died — partly because of the Second World War, but also because the model could not survive scrutiny. As soon as customers understood what was happening, the relationship was poisoned forever.

Framework is betting that the next century of consumer products belongs to companies that make the opposite trade. Lodge has been betting that for one and a quarter centuries. The European Union is now writing it into law.

If your business plan looks more like the Phoebus Cartel than like Lodge, the question isn’t whether the model breaks. It’s whether you’ll see it coming.

Here’s the thing about a repair-first business. It looks slower. It looks more expensive. It looks like you’re leaving money on the table by not designing in the upgrade trap. And then twenty years go by, and the company that made the disposable product is gone — and the company that made the repairable one has a customer base that won’t shut up about how much they love the product.

But there’s a piece of this that the laws and the supply chains can’t fix on their own. The companies that are best at making things that last are also the best at fixing things when they break. And what they’ve figured out — the part that doesn’t show up in the legislation — is something researchers call the service recovery paradox. It’s the finding that a customer who hits a real problem, and watches you handle it well, ends up more loyal than a customer who never had a problem at all.

If you want a system for that — for catching problems early, for empowering your team to fix things without escalating every decision, for following through so customers know you actually care — our Experience Helpdesk has a lesson series on exactly that. Service recovery, trust repair, the architecture of a team that handles bad news well. The link is at johnsandtaylor.com/services/ux-helpdesk.

Thanks for listening to Marginally Better. If this episode resonated, leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps other people find the show — and given the topic, that feels like a fitting way to grow.

If you want behind-the-scenes notes from me and the rest of the team, head to marginallybettershow.com or follow the link in our show notes.

Marginally Better is a Calufrax radio production. Our producer is Nicole Hubbard with research by Connie Evans. I’m Joe Taylor, Jr.

Marginally Better S01E17: The Repair Relationship Revolution

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Joe Taylor Jr.

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