Buy It Broken, Fix It, Sell It On

What you actually do

You buy something good that is broken, and you make it work again.

A ski jacket with a dead zip. Hockey gloves with a split palm. A backpack whose strap has torn away. A pair of boots that only need new laces and an hour of polish. These things are almost worthless while they are broken, because almost nobody wants to deal with them. Once they work, they are worth what a used good thing is worth, and the gap between those two numbers is your wages.

The important word is "fix". Buying a $6 hoodie and selling it for $18 without touching it is not really a business. It is a bet that you know something the seller didn't, and some weeks you will be wrong. Mending the hoodie nobody else would mend is different: you have made it better, and you can explain exactly why it is worth more.

What it costs to start

Tools first, stock second. The tools are the part that lasts.

• A needle and strong thread, about $10. This fixes more than anything else on the list.
• Fabric glue and a roll of repair tape for tears in outdoor gear, about $15.
• A seam ripper and a few spare zips and buckles, about $20.

Then about $20 to $30 for your first two or three broken items. That is $30 to $60 all in, and roughly half of it is reusable for a year.

Learn the repair before you buy the thing. Replacing a zip is genuinely hard the first time and easy the fifth. Practise on something out of your own cupboard that nobody minds you ruining, and ask an adult who sews to watch you do the first one.

Find your first sale this week

1. Learn one repair properly. Zips, or seams, or straps. One.
2. Fix two things from your own house so you have something to show and you know how long it takes.
3. Go looking for that exact problem. At a thrift shop or a garage sale, ask for the damaged pile, because most shops have one and would rather it left. Tell them what you're doing; some will give you a better price for taking it.
4. Sell to people who want that thing. A mended snowboard jacket sells to someone who snowboards, not to the general public. Your own school, your team, your rink.

Say what you fixed, in the listing and out loud. "New zip, I put it in myself, here's a photo of the stitching" is the sentence that gets you a buyer and a reputation.

What to charge

Work out three numbers before you buy anything: what it costs you, what it is worth mended, and how long the repair takes. If the gap between the first two is less than $20, walk away, because the repair will eat it.

A worked example. A jacket costs you $8 broken. A new zip is $6. The repair takes you two hours. Mended, jackets like it sell near you for around $45. So about $31 ahead for two hours plus the hunting, which is decent, and it is decent because of the repair, not despite it.

Write every item in a notebook or a spreadsheet: what you paid, what you spent on parts, hours taken, what it sold for. This is the only idea on this list where you can be losing money without noticing, and the notebook is how you notice. After ten items you will know which repairs are worth your time, and that knowledge is the actual asset.

How the big brands do exactly this

Worth knowing, because it tells you this is an industry rather than a side hustle, and three of the companies doing it are Canadian.

Arc'teryx, from North Vancouver, runs a programme called ReBIRD. You can trade in used gear at a store for credit. Arc'teryx then washes it, repairs it and sells it again on its own resale site, and what is too far gone gets cut up and made into something else.

Canada Goose runs Generations. Send back an old parka, get a gift card, and the company refreshes the coat and sells it on. They only list the ones that pass a quality check.

lululemon, from Vancouver, runs Like New, and Patagonia in the United States has run Worn Wear since 2017, which cleans and repairs trade-ins before reselling them.

Look at what all four have in common. None of them just resells. Every one of them repairs first, because the repair is what makes the item worth selling. You are running the same model with a needle instead of a repair centre, and you can say so when you sell.

Rules and staying safe

Read this section with a parent, because there is more here than in most of these ideas.

• Sell to people you know, or through a parent's account on a marketplace. Most online marketplaces require the account holder to be an adult, so ask a parent to check the rules of any site before you list anything.
• Meet a buyer you don't know in a public place with a parent, or don't meet them. A porch pickup where they pay first is fine. A stranger's house is not.
• Be honest about the repair, every time. "Zip replaced, small mark on the left cuff, see photo" keeps a customer. Hiding it loses you a friend and your reputation at the same time.
• Never resell safety equipment you have repaired. Helmets, car seats, climbing gear, life jackets. A mended helmet can look perfect and still fail, and that is somebody's head. Sell those on only if they are undamaged, or not at all.
• Don't buy anything that turns up cheap with no story. A parent should be part of any decision to buy used gear from someone you don't know.
• Take payment before the item leaves your hands, in cash or by e-transfer to a parent's account.
• Keep the business money separate from your own, even if it is just an envelope.

On taxes: nobody has to register for GST/HST until they sell more than $30,000 in a year, and a teenager mending jackets is nowhere near it. Keep the notebook anyway, because it is your record of what you spent.

What Jacob would do

Jacob is 15 and lives in Toronto, where people move flats on the first of the month and leave good broken things behind. He is the spreadsheet one of the three, so he would run this as a spreadsheet business.

He'd learn one repair, zips, because a dead zip is the most common reason a good jacket is thrown out and the fix is a known quantity. He'd buy three broken jackets, not ten. Then he'd log hours per repair, and after a month he would know something most adults doing this don't: whether the four-hour jobs actually pay better than the one-hour ones. Usually they don't, and Jacob is the kind of person who would follow that number and stop taking them.

When it stops being fun

The zip you put in crooked and have to unpick. A jacket that turns out to smell of smoke, which no repair fixes. Four hours on a coat that then sells for $25. A buyer who agrees a price, makes you hold it for a week, and vanishes.

Start with $30 and three items, not $200 and twenty. Keep the notebook honest, and be willing to write off the one that beat you. If you can lose $8 on a jacket and go back for another one, you are already better at this than most people ever get.