Repair Café
Repair Café is a network of community venues where people can bring broken everyday items—electronics, gadgets, bicycles, clothing, and more—to fix with help from volunteers. They usually meet in places like churches, libraries, or college campuses, where tools are available and owners can work alongside others.
Repair Cafés are part of a grassroots effort to cut waste, reduce overconsumption, and fight planned obsolescence. They encourage a do-it-together and do-it-yourself spirit and help strengthen social ties in communities.
The first Repair Café was started by Dutch journalist Martine Postma in Amsterdam in 2009. The inaugural event took place on 18 October 2009 at the Fijnhout Theater in Amsterdam-West. In 2010, the Repair Café Foundation was created to support local groups around the world in starting their own cafés.
Since then the movement has grown quickly. By 2016 there were more than 1,000 Repair Cafés worldwide. The Guardian estimated about 1,300 cafés in 2019. The Repair Café Foundation said the number exceeded 2,000 by 2021. By October 2025, more than 3,800 cafés were available to visit.
In 2017, International Repair Day was announced as a yearly event on the third Saturday of October.
To share repair knowledge, the Repair Café Foundation created RepairMonitor, an online tool that collects repair data in the Open Repair Data standard. It records information such as product category, brand, age, fault, repair attempt, and repair outcome. As of October 2025, over 305,000 repairs are logged in the database.
Some cafés also use 3D printing to make replacement parts. After potentially scanning the broken piece, a new part can be printed and fitted to restore the item, though the process can take some time.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 10:57 (CET).