“Everything is gonna be retro at some point.”

Retrospekt is Riverwest’s resident retro-tech refurbisher and manufacturer, founded by Adam and Kori Fuerst. For the past decade, Retrospekt has been repairing and reselling vintage Polaroid cameras to a global market. The couple got their start thrifting vintage cameras for the film left in them and selling the actual cameras back to Polaroid. Now they’re one of the company’s largest repair and manufacturing centers ballooning to around 42 employees. One of those employees is Ryan DeWerth who works in customer service, although roles at the company are not that rigid.

Ryan DeWerth: We spend our time between customer service and order packing, they don’t want us to be looking at screens too much, so I might be doing a couple emails for a few hours and then I get sick of that and I just go pack orders for a bit.

Casmir Byrne: What does customer service look like for you guys?

Ryan DeWerth: A lot of emails are from people who are having issues with products, or they just need information on how to make it work. We do a lot of work with the younger generations that have never used a Polaroid camera before, they just sort of need a bit of education. They take a picture and say “Hey, why doesn’t it look like the picture I just took on my phone,” so we have to explain to them” Well, phones do a lot to make an image look good.”

Casmir Byrne: What does the repair process look like for the cameras you get in?

Ryan DeWerth:  So, anybody around the world emails Polaroid and says, “I’ve got this vintage camera; can you repair it,” and they’ll send it to us. We get about ten cameras a day on average, and we usually get them out the door in about two to three weeks afterwords. Closer to the wall is where a lot of the repairs happen, closer to the aisles here is where a lot of the refurbishing happens. And that’s not even just for the cameras either. Some of the other vintage items we get in, like CD players might need some work done on them, or a Darth Vader clock that just needs a bit of polishing on it. I get so distracted even being here for like 4 years, there’s just so much fun stuff to look at

Casmir Byrne: So you’ve expanded into Retro-Tech aside from Polaroids?

Ryan DeWerth: Yeah, that is a big chunk of the business, the Polaroid side of things, but we’ve recently expanded into other product categories, iPods, typewriters, Nintendos, Game Boys, synthesizers, VCRs. We just buy up the product we can get our hands on and refurbish them as needed, we’re really trying to expand, it’s the nice thing about this business model, it’s not too limiting y’know, everything is gonna be retro at some point.

Casmir Byrne: So most of your business is refurbishing retro-tech and reselling them?

Ryan DeWerth: Yeah, I’d say that is a big part of it. We’ve recently started manufacturing a lot of our own products in the past 2 years or so, so it’s kinda a mixture of new and vintage stuff, but a big chunk of the business, and what we started with, was doing repairs, refurbishing and reselling. I’d say we do about 100 to 150 orders every day on our website, come the holiday season it can get up to 5-600 orders every day. So, it can be pretty busy back here come November.

Casmir Byrne: Is the future of the business going into more independent manufacturing?

Ryan DeWerth: We definitely want to still be doing repairs and have a lot of the vintage tech, but we realized that in order to be sustainable long term we probably do need to have some other revenue streams. So, we have expanded into new manufactured items such as the camera cases and the boomboxes. We’re definitely trying to still keep the refurbishing stuff alive too, because that is why this business started, to keep all these items out of landfills.

Casmir Byrne: And how do you get new items in for refurbishing and reselling?

 Ryan DeWerth: So, Amanda and Shannon, when they’re not helping customers, they’re on their computers on eBay and Goodwill just accumulating inventory for us, we’ll maybe buy like 50 old vintage Polaroid cameras every day, they arrive, we take them apart and do any needed repairs. They either go into the old housings, and we sell them as a vintage camera, or they get put into new housing like the custom collaborations ones we do, like the hello kitty one. It’s old parts from the 1980s on the inside but the external shells are the ones that we manufactured ourselves. Peanuts are one too that was really popular, people seem to really love their Snoopy this year.

Casmir Byrne: So you have a few licensed products already, Polaroid, Peanuts, Hello Kitty, is there more on the way with that?

Ryan DeWerth: As far as the Polaroid stuff goes, they have to sign off on anything that we license out with them, so every now and then there’s back and forth on whether they want to still do cobranded stuff. For a sneak peek at some new stuff we’ve got coming up, Miffy is a character that’s really big in Europe. I’m not super familiar with it myself, but I like the colors a lot.