Retro Tech pt. 1

A couple of weeks ago, Francis Zierer and I talked to Kori Fuerst, the cofounder of Retrospekt.

Retrospekt is a consumer electronics company that specializes in retro tech. They both refurbish and restore retro tech and produce some of it. They also sell other people and companies’ retro tech and adjacent products, like music and film.

We covered high fashion collaborations, how many VHS tapes are in a pallet, and possible disruptions to the retro tech supply chain. The conversation was so interesting, we decided to break it out into two parts! You’re reading part one right now.

Click here to listen to the podcast episode instead. Or keep scrolling for a curation of Dirt’s favorite things available from Retrospekt. — Daisy Alioto

Francis Zierer: You guys do a lot of collaborations. When did that start happening?

Kori Fuerst: That started in 2019 with Barbie being our very first one. We have done two Barbie cameras, one that was a direct riff on the one Polaroid did with Barbie in the nineties. And then we did a Malibu Barbie one.

My husband Adam and I own the business together. One year we decided to go to the licensing expo in Las Vegas, and we just carried a Polaroid camera around with us. That's where we met Sanrio for the first time and have now worked with them for years. That opened us up to this whole world of brand licensing on retro electronics. So we've kind of carved out our niche in that area. 

FZ: You guys started doing this seriously after you and Adam had been into Polaroids and it was cheaper to buy old cameras at thrift stores that might have a few shots left in them than it was to buy $40, $30 worth of film on eBay.

When does it become a business, when you hire your first employees?  

KF: We filed our LLC in 2015. So this summer will be our 10 year anniversary. And the business now is very different than it was then. The story of the end of Polaroid Corporation, and the start of the Impossible Project, which is the company that retook over the manufacturing of Polaroid Instant Film and brought it back to the consumer market—we're linked up with that story.

We were previously supplying the Impossible Project with cameras that we would thrift and find. A few years into that, they approached us to see if we would be willing to provide the refurbished goods. I was in my last year of grad school, Adam was working his first year post grad school and we had to decide if we wanted to do this for a career. And obviously we did and haven't looked back. So in 2015, we needed to build a team.

And actually our longest standing employee is our head of repairs now. He came with camera repair knowledge and he's been with us for 10 years. We were all trained in how to repair and refurbish Polaroid Institute cameras from the seventies, eighties and nineties. And then they eventually just gave us the license to use their branding on these cameras. They have amazing new Polaroid cameras, but we still serve the market of people who want the vintage ones. 

DA: Are you ever contacted by people in the entertainment industry about supplying props? 

KF: Yes. We work with ACME in New York. We get a lot of panicked calls when some set needs something overnighted and they're willing to pay an arm and a leg to do it.

Every time Stranger Things has a season, we really pop off. The Walkman that was featured last season we were able to find and the headphones too, they're really obscure Nova 45 headphones that she wore. We had the Kate Bush tape, the headphones and the Walkman. That was our first TikTok that got a gazillion views and everyone wanted to buy it. And I think we ended up selling the Kate Bush cassette tape for like a hundred bucks on our site.  

DA: Do you have a favorite collaboration? 

KF: Do you know the brand Grillo's Pickles? Yeah, we made a pickle cam. I think we made a hundred and they sold out immediately. It was really fun. I like those moments where it feels almost one of a kind. And if you want it, you’ve got to buy it quick.

FZ: I was curious what both of you thought might be the vintage of 20 years from now, what will be the desirable tech from today?

KF: My gut is to say it's tied to fashion. I like to remind people that when the Sony Walkman came out, that was the first time that music was portable and private. That sparked the moment of like, we wear our technology and it is wrapped up in fashion.

That's really well exemplified in this whole Y2K resurgence of wearing the iPod shuffle as a hair clip. So I think headphones are a good contender for that because part of being into retro stuff is just the aesthetic in general.  

FZ: You sell refurbished Game Boys, right? 

KF: We do, yeah. There are a lot of people doing it and doing really fun things like modding them and changing the button colors or even manufacturing new shells. Right now it's a little oversaturated. It's funny, it's a niche thing and it's oversaturated. So we don't do too much. And Nintendo can be a little litigious. I don't think they're going after these small companies putting on new backlit screens. I think it's bad luck to go after people doing that, especially on a small scale. So yeah, we do Nintendo Game Boys, a few N64s, the stuff we all grew up with and love. If we come across it, we fix them up. 

DA: It seems like the supply chain for Polaroid parts is the most narrow of the products that you deal with. Is that accurate? 

KF: They made millions of them. So we have two full-time purchasers that just scour the internet and work with various direct sellers who are finding them at estate sales. We worked with a guy before things changed in Russia. There are a ton of Polaroid cameras in Russia.

There was a factory there and the timing of how their economy in the eighties and early nineties worked was that none of their citizens could afford them. So there's a ton of Polaroid cameras in Russia that we were able to source for a while, not anymore. And I once came across a storage locker that I still dream about. Just once in 10 years, there was a storage locker filled with deadstock Polaroid cameras. And that was a very lucky find. 

DA: What other oddities have you bought in bulk or stumbled on? I think you told me that you just bought a big pallet of VHS tapes.

KF: Correction, 40 pallets of VHS tapes. So yeah, 40,000 VHS tapes and the price justified buying them. VHS and audio cassette tapes are my passion projects right now, where if I have a chunk of an hour, I'll just sit and refurbish them, rewind them, clean mold off them, re-case them.

And back to the question about what might see a resurgence, I do think DVDs will come back. It doesn't feel sexy yet. You go to Goodwill and you see a wall of DVDs and it just doesn't do it for me yet. But I think there's something to be said about the ease of it. It's just the DVD. The whole thing about the intro screens on DVDs and how that is such a timepiece that really hallmarks that period.

Further reading: Requiem for the DVD menu

I can think of the Harry Potter one, how it looked. And now that I have small kids, we try to limit screen time. But the idea of just popping something in and nothing autoplays after it or my child doesn't have to navigate some internet interface or subscription. I think that's gonna flip and be really alluring.

There's a product called the Yoto player, it's like a riff on a cassette. So there's little cards that you stick into a machine and it reads you the story or plays you the song. And they're really popular. And I think that's a good sign of media like that getting a resurgence. 📼

DIRT x RETROSPEKT

Something old, something new…

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