About Cumbria Tech
If you’ve just dropped your phone or need urgent repair work, you probably don’t care about how I founded Cumbria Tech with just £30 and grew it into Carlisle’s leading repair premises. But, if you’re exploring options for the future or you’ve got time on your hands, make yourself a brew and let me tell you my story. My name is Sean Wright, and this is how I founded my company.
I’m always being asked: “How long have you been doing this? How did you learn?”
“Most of my life,” is the answer - and I taught myself along with a bit of help from a course I took on mobile phone repair a few years ago.
I STARTED FIXING DEVICES WHEN I WAS TWO YEARS OLD
When I was a small child, screwdrivers were locked away where I couldn’t find them. I found other ways to take appliances to bits -nothing was safe, including clocks, irons and record players!
At the age of four, I chose to wire a plug but got the earth and live mixed up and received the shock of my life. It took my breath away – literally!
My love of repair work carried on as I grew older. Computers arrived. I started going to computer fairs and building my own computers from scratch.
Next, in 2008, smartphones arrived – along with you couldn’t replace batteries in iPhone 3G. The iPhone you couldn’t open, allegedly. I did an electronics course at Carlisle College in the 1990s, so when these non-removable battery stories were circulating, I just had to prove they were wrong.
Fast forward to 2013 and, after a couple of crises in my life, I found myself with no job. For me, that was tough to take at 42 as I’d always been in full time employment. Applying for job after job and with nothing happening, I decided to pick up my screwdriver and bought a broken iPhone 4 for just £20 and spent another tenner on parts. I sold the repaired phone for £70 and went back to applying for work.
The phone rang – and the call I received changed the direction of my entire life. The customer who had bought the new iPhone from me wanted another three fixed and then he recommended my service to others.
I was told I was wasting my time and I’d be better off looking for work than bothering fixing them things. I ignored this advice and carried on. More phones came my way and I set off on my journey in December 2014, registering Cumbria Tech with company house.
Some 6000 devices later, two business premises and three temporary ones in between moves, we opened our flagship store on Fisher Street in August 2020.
Our ethos is: quality and Value for money with a polite and friendly service. People are important in our business, and we try to the best of our ability to demonstrate a caring approach - not just to our people but the devices you entrust us to fix.
