Written by In August, Ugo Vallauri was visiting independent repairers in Kenya. One of them opens up the power supplies of Lenovo ThinkPads, the kind of thing nobody designed to be opened, and makes them repairable again. While they talked about Repair Day, he had an idea of his own: why not give all his customers a discount on that day? Ugo had not suggested it, but it was already on Restart’s mind. He told us this story on our community call last Wednesday, 23 September, and it says a lot about where Repair Day is heading.
Ugo and Holly joined us from The Restart Project, a London-based social enterprise that started in 2012 with the first Restart Party, their name for a repair cafe. The idea was never just DIY, it was repairing together. Restart also co-founded Right to Repair Europe, the coalition that helped push through European ecodesign rules, and some of us in the EU are about to benefit from the new right to repair directive. But Ugo was clear that a law passed is not a problem solved. You still need a culture that changes how we relate to the things around us, and you need repair, reuse and maker communities talking to each other more. Inside GIG, making and repairing already meet in creative ways. That is part of why Repair Day exists, and why they have celebrated it since 2017.
Some numbers. Repair Day is on 17 October 2026, the third Saturday of October, but the global map takes events from 10 to 25 October, so you can join without being free on the Saturday. Last year there were more than 3,500 events in 50 countries. This year almost a thousand are already on the map, and Holly told us 50 more arrived right after Friday’s newsletter. It began as a Repair Cafe Week, became a day, and Ugo says it is now turning into a fortnight. The theme is “repair brings us together”, a small bet that in a divided world repair is something most of us agree on. And a confession: it is the 10th Repair Day, but the 10th anniversary of the first one is next year. Ugo admitted he still cannot decide which to say.
GIG is an official partner this year, and through Make-a-Thek about 20 events will happen in different countries. Holly walked us through the new Repair Day website and toolkit, which is available in many languages (help with translations is welcome). It includes logos, editable posters, social media graphics and a template press release. That last one worked well in the UK, where 29 events got local media coverage last year. If you cannot organise anything, you can still fix one thing at home, share it and use #repairday. From 2027, partners become co-owners of the initiative and help shape the theme.
Holly also showed us a few festivals to give us a sense of the range. Restart itself is hosting one at the Barbican Centre in London on the day, with a photography exhibition on e-waste, bike workshops, phone repair kits for young people, visible ceramic mending and a clothes swap. Festivals are also planned in Bath, Portsmouth, Edinburgh and on the north coast of Northern Ireland. In Austria one runs for 17 days, with musical instrument repair clinics, and in Italy a repair cafe is working with a local university. In Ukraine, a group is holding a repair cafe with a professional college inside an underground shelter. They hope that taking back some control over their things and circumstances will lift morale and build bonds, and connect them to everyone else doing the same on that day.
Our own community is already in it. Maria from Fab Lab Egypt in Cairo has registered an event for 24 October. They will not fix people’s belongings for them but teach how to find what is wrong with an electronic board, plus textile electronics and maybe wood. When Fadia asked what surprised her most, she said: that people are interested at all. Gabe is organising an event in Baguio City on 17 October with a community book shop and a circular fashion startup, and they ran a session just last Saturday. Felipe is co-organising two weeks of repair events in Bristol. Rosanna is planning something around 20 October, if the venue is confirmed, where grandparents and grandchildren repair toys and turn old cribs and swaddles into quiet books. Adriana’s team is preparing a repair and share festival in Wuppertal with second-hand and vintage stores. Kirstin wrote in the chat that theirs will start by fixing broken library things.
If those plans feel too big, Ugo had a message for you. Celebrating can be as simple as three people in a maker space opening a repair station, where normally they would make something new. It can be a call to people in your community whose repair skills you had not thought of, or a first meetup. As Ugo put it, anything counts. Matthew, who works with his community in northern Uganda and South Sudan and was in Nairobi that day to present on repair, reminded us that for them every day is a repair day, and the 17th is the most special one. He also asked whether we could hold a virtual moment with everyone holding a screwdriver. Restart does not have the capacity to run it this year but would gladly amplify it, and a rolling call across time zones sounds like a good plan for 2027. Until then, tag us and Restart on the day.
To join, add your event to the map. If you need help planning, Restart has an updated guide to running community repair events, and Restarters.net is where more than a thousand groups organise events, coordinate volunteers and log what they fix (it is a Discourse forum, just like ours, as Felipe pointed out). For questions about Repair Day itself, write to [email protected], and sign up for the mailing list on the website. And if there is a repairer near you who opens the things nobody was supposed to open, ask them about a discount day. You might start a tradition.
