A Pittsburgh Startup Is Betting You’ll Pay More for Gadgets You Can Fix Yourself

The demonstration takes about ninety seconds, and Lena Whitcomb has clearly done it hundreds of times. She flips a pair of over-ear headphones upside down, removes four screws from each ear cup with a single screwdriver, and lifts out a battery the size of a matchbox. Then she snaps in a new one, closes the cup and hands the headphones across the table, already playing music. “That’s the whole company,” she says. “Everything else is details.”

Whitcomb is the co-founder and chief executive of Partwise Devices, a 23-person hardware startup in Pittsburgh’s Strip District that designs headphones, a portable speaker and a small desk lamp around one idea: every part that commonly fails should be replaceable by the owner, with one standard screwdriver, in under ten minutes. The company closed a $14 million funding round last month, and its first products shipped to customers in the spring. Now it faces the question every repair-friendly gadget maker eventually meets. Will enough people pay a little more today for a product that lasts longer tomorrow?

Built around the parts that break

Whitcomb spent nine years as a product engineer at a large electronics manufacturer before leaving in 2023. Her co-founder, Dev Raman, ran a phone and laptop repair shop near the University of Pittsburgh for most of a decade. Raman says the idea came from his old workbench. “Ninety percent of what came through the door was the same five failures,” he says. “Dead batteries, cracked charging ports, worn ear pads, broken hinges, a loose button. None of those should end the life of a product, and most of the time they did.”

So Partwise started from the failure list rather than the feature list. Batteries sit behind screwed panels instead of being glued in place. Charging ports are mounted on small separate boards that cost $9 to replace instead of being soldered to the main circuit board. Hinges, ear pads, headbands and speaker grilles all come off with the same screwdriver, which ships in the box clipped inside the charging case.

The desk lamp, the company’s least glamorous product, may be its clearest example. Its LED module, dimmer board and power cable each come out separately, and the base is held together with brass threaded inserts rather than plastic clips that crack after a few disassemblies. Raman likes to point out that the lamp was the hardest product to get right, precisely because nobody expects to open a lamp. “If we can make people comfortable fixing the boring thing on their desk,” he says, “they will try it on the expensive thing in their bag.” Customer support logs suggest it is working: the most common lamp repair, a worn power cable, now takes owners an average of four minutes.

What it costs

The Partwise headphones sell for $229, about $30 more than comparable models from larger brands, by the company’s own comparison. The speaker is $149 and the lamp is $89. Replacement parts are sold directly on the company’s website: a battery is $24, ear pads are $19 a pair, and a charging port module is $9. Every part has a printed repair guide and a short video, and the company publishes the guides even for customers who bought their device secondhand.

Whitcomb argues that the higher sticker price is misleading. “If our headphones last six years with one battery swap and a set of pads, the cost per year is much lower than buying a $199 pair every two and a half years,” she says. That math depends, of course, on the company still being around in six years to sell those parts, a point investors raised early. Partwise says it publishes the specifications for its batteries and ports so that independent shops could source compatible parts if it ever stopped selling them.

A repairable product is a promise that outlives the sale. We have to be the kind of company that can keep that promise, or the whole idea falls apart.

Lena Whitcomb, co-founder and CEO of Partwise Devices

The trade-offs engineers don’t advertise

Repairability is not free, and Partwise is unusually open about what it gave up. Screws and separate modules take up space, so the headphones weigh 31 grams more than the company’s first prototype, which used adhesive. Water resistance was harder to achieve with removable panels; the speaker is rated for splashes rather than full submersion. And modular boards add steps on the assembly line, which raises the cost of building each unit.

Engineers at the company say most of those trade-offs can shrink with time. The second version of the headphones, due next year, is expected to cut the weight gap in half. But Raman says some compromises are permanent, and he would rather customers know about them. “We will never be the thinnest,” he says. “We are fine with that. Nobody ever brought me a device because it was too thick.”

Selling repair to people who don’t think about it

The harder problem may be marketing. Surveys regularly show that shoppers say they care about repairability, but buying decisions in a store aisle tend to come down to price, sound quality and brand. A few states have passed right-to-repair laws that require manufacturers to make parts and manuals available, and those laws have raised awareness. Still, Partwise’s early sales skew heavily toward people who already fix their own things.

The company sold about 18,000 devices in its first six months, mostly through its own website. That is respectable for a young hardware startup and tiny next to the tens of millions of headphones sold in the US each year. A pilot with a regional electronics chain in the Midwest begins in November, with demo stations where shoppers can try swapping a battery themselves. Whitcomb calls it the most important test the company will run this year.

What investors are watching

The new funding round was led by a Pittsburgh-based climate and manufacturing fund, with several angel investors from the local robotics community. Investors we spoke with described a few clear milestones they want to see before the company raises again:

1. Retail sales that hold up outside the company’s own website.
2. Parts revenue growing steadily, a sign that customers are actually repairing instead of replacing.
3. Return rates below the industry average, which Partwise says it currently beats.
4. A fourth product category, likely a small wireless keyboard, without the design team doubling in size.

“The sustainability story gets the meeting,” said Carla Nguyen, a partner at the lead fund. “The unit economics have to win the deal. So far they are getting close.”

Back at the workbench

On a Tuesday afternoon, the repair lab on the building’s second floor is full of returned devices, though few of them are broken. Engineers take apart units sent back for any reason and log which screws stripped, which clips cracked and how long each repair took. A whiteboard tracks the median battery swap time across customer videos submitted to the company: currently six minutes and forty seconds.

Raman wants it under five by next year. Whitcomb wants the retail pilot to work. Both say the company will know within twelve months whether repairable gadgets can be a business or remain a niche for people who already own a screwdriver set. Slow Business will check back in when the first store results come in.