You drop off your engagement ring to be repaired. You get a handwritten paper ticket. No confirmation, no updates, no idea when it's coming back. For something with that much value, it's a stressful experience. And for everyday items, that same friction is often enough to make people skip the repair and buy new instead.

In this episode of HappyPorch Radio, Barry O'Kane speaks with Emily Watts, founder and CEO of Coblr, a company building the digital infrastructure to connect and power the repair economy for the first time.

Emily spent years in corporate operations, was COO of a scheduling startup that sold to Toast, and then did something unusual: she ran her own mail-in repair business for two years, not as the endgame, but to understand the problem from the inside. What she found was an industry running on software from the early 2000s, brands managing repair manually even at scale, and consumer intent dying because the process was just too much hassle.

Her thesis is simple. She compares repair to resale: shopping secondhand used to mean sorting through racks at a charity shop. Technology removed that friction and the market exploded. Emily believes repair is sitting in the same place right now, with the demand already there but held back by a broken experience. Coblr's job is to fix the experience.

✨ In this episode:

• Emily explains why repair is where resale was before technology removed the friction, and why she thinks the same growth is coming
• We hear how she ran her own mail-in repair business for two years to understand the problem before building the software
• Emily describes how Coblr gives repair providers purpose-built software to replace legacy tools and automate the administrative work that costs them at least eight hours a week. For consumers, it's a little like a Domino's Pizza Tracker for your repair: status updates, text notifications, and full transparency
• Barry and Emily discuss how brands can embed repair into customer service, retail, and online channels without building anything in-house
• Emily explains the aligned incentives: brands get loyalty and data, repair providers get consistent revenue, consumers get a modern experience, and items stay out of landfill
• We hear about Sal, Coblr's AI diagnostic tool that can assess damage from a photograph and estimate the cost of a fix
• Emily shares how repair providers in Coblr's network are making 20% more monthly revenue and scaling their teams for the first time

👤 About our guest:

Emily Watts is the founder and CEO of Coblr, a company building the digital infrastructure to connect and power the repair economy. Coblr provides repair businesses with end-to-end software to run their operations, and embeds repair into brands' omni-channel experience so that getting something fixed is as easy as buying new. Before founding Coblr, Emily was COO at Sling, a B2B SaaS scheduling company acquired by Toast, and spent two years running her own mail-in repair business to understand the repair industry from the inside. Find Coblr at coblros.com or on LinkedIn and Instagram at Coblrshop.

🌍 About HappyPorch

HappyPorch is a purpose-driven software engineering consultancy focused on the circular economy.

Learn more:https://www.happyporch.com

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