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From Zero to Side Hustle
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My Monday mantra.
🎨 Bob Ross gave away his entire method for free on public television for eleven years. Every brush, technique, and trick.
The obvious move was to hold something back. He didn’t. His company still outlived him by three decades. We think about that a lot. The knowledge was never scarce.
Knowing how to do it was. Doing it well, every Tuesday, for years, was.
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A 70-Person Waiting List For A Machine From 1953
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Typewriters came back. People want their grandmother's Olympia to work again, and younger buyers want one that types rather than decorates.
The manufacturers are decades dead, the parts are not made, and nobody spends two years learning typebar alignment to fix one machine.
That's the gap: the machines survived and the people who can service them did not.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Repair at a real price, on a queue. Typewriter Chicago publishes $350 to $400 for an average repair, rush jobs at 1.5x, and only five appointments a month. Dead machines arrive from antique shops and a $20 trade-in credit, so cost of goods is close to nothing.
The repair pays the rent. The parts pile is the margin.
►Lucas Dul started at fourteen and went full-time. The Sun-Times found him at 23 in his parents' basement with a backlog seventy people deep and sixty machines waiting, and he has since opened a storefront on Ogden Avenue. Machines he restores whole become retail inventory, so the same dead typewriter is either a parts donor or a product.
Zooming out: the scarcity is not the machines, it is the hands.
Anything mass-produced, mechanically repairable and no longer manufactured works this way. Sewing machines, film cameras, arcade boards, turntables..
🥢The winners will be the ones who publish rates and then ration access. Five appointments a month is not a limitation, it is a price signal. A shop that cannot take more work can only raise its prices.
🍜 The risk is that the ceiling is one pair of hands. A seventy-deep backlog is unbilled work, and the trade has almost no training pipeline to hire from. Demand is a taste cycle too: one Minnesota repairman watched his business fall 80 percent within three years when personal computers arrived.
You might also like ⇢ What a San Diego Shop Charges: $25 Service Up to $195 Restoration
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What's your take?
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The Sunglasses With No Arms
Ombraz
A product is genuinely new when it removes a failure the customer already remembers.
Most physical products compete on looks. The durable ones often compete on the moment the old thing broke.
What they uncovered: Jensen Brehm and Nikolai Paloni founded Ombraz in 2018 after Brehm's glasses snapped on a camel trek in India. He tied them back together with cord. The fix became the product: sunglasses with no arms, held by an adjustable cord. The launch brought in $250,000 in pre-orders from 3,000 pairs, and more than 100,000 pairs have sold since.
The mistake in eyewear is competing on frames when the real failure is the hinge, the lost pair, or the sunglasses that went overboard.
Ombraz did not build a better hinge. They deleted it.
What they learned: The first buyer is not “outdoor consumers.” It is the person who has already snapped a pair on a trail or watched one sink off a boat. They are not looking for a better style. They are looking for the thing that finally fixes their problem.
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Used Gear Grew A Warranty
Secondhand outdoor equipment used to mean a milk crate at the back of the shop.
Then the brands legitimized it. Patagonia's Worn Wear has sold roughly one million items through its own branded secondhand channel since 2017, running on Trove's logistics. REI's Re/Supply arm was described by its own re-commerce manager in 2024 as profitable, more than doubled in five years, with about 1.5 million items kept in circulation. Graded, warrantied, returnable resale is now a thing customers expect rather than tolerate.
That is what makes the small version work. Second Wind Sports in Bend, Oregon publishes its split in the open: 70 percent to the consignor on items over $100, 65 percent under, on 90-day terms. No negotiation, no appraisal theater.
Where the trend branches next:
Winter hardgoods, where skis and boots turn over on a season clock
Children's gear, which is outgrown and resold every twelve months by definition
Paddle craft, too bulky to ship and therefore permanently local
Buying brand trade-in stock and reselling it into a market the brand does not serve
► The brands trained the customer to trust used, and then left most of the country uncovered.
A national program can grade a jacket. It cannot drive a kayak across town.
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us what nobody in your town can fix any more. Forward this to whoever still has their grandmother's typewriter in a closet. See you tomorrow
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