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Dealers
April 25, 2017
Managing director Murphy appeared on Dragon’s Den in 2012 securing £50,000 to start his firm
Reviveaphone has unveiled plans for a national rollout of its business as it targets 20,000 repairs by the end of this year.
Managing director Oliver Murphy (pictured) told Mobile News he intends to achieve this by raising up to £1 million by next month through promotion of the repair service and outside investment.
He is also planning to increase the fleets of vans visiting customers. There are six in operation, with a seventh to be added in Exeter this week. It will be an incremental roll out with two vans per month, hitting a total of 23 by 2018.
The company carried out 1,300 repairs between June 2015 – 2016. The figure currently stands at 3,700 on target to hit 5,700 by June this year. Murphy is targeting 20,000 repairs by 2018.
Boreham-based Reviveaphone currently operates in Essex, Kent, Brighton, Bristol, Luton and Coventry, employing nine members of staff. Turnover last year almost doubled from 2015 to £300,000.
Its offers a same day repair service with technicians spending up to an hour fixing devices. According to Murphy, the service is more popular with the 40-50 year age group, stating they are more likely to repair damaged devices than a younger demographic.
Raising investment
“If we can get the investment, we can roll out this convenient service nationally. The plan is to get the fundraising target by crowdsourcing. Then we can roll out two vans every month and increase our coverage as much as possible.
“Each will be within an hour’s radius from customers to ensure we reach as many as we can. We’ll raise the funds by advertising through social media, email marketing and speaking to high net worth people.”
Reviveaphone was founded in 2012, and gained national recognition two years later when Murphy appeared on Dragon’s Den and secured £50,000 investment from Kelly Hoppen MBE.
She held a 25 per cent stake in the company, with the shares bought back in May 2016. Murphy said he could revisit the idea of having Hoppen reinvest into Reviveaphone.
The company initially began selling smartphone repair products under the same name, specifically a solution to remove material that were shortcircuiting devices. A second product, Splash, was a spray-on water resistant coating to prevent water damage.
Around 100,000 Reviveaphone kits and 15,000 Splash products were sold before being discontinued last October. due to manufacturers making smartphones water resistant. The Reviveaphone kits were ranged by Carphone Warehouse and Irish distributor TNS, which supplies Dixons, Boots and Tesco.
Reviveaphone also signed a US distribution agreement with Shark Distribution, which placed an initial order of 10,000 units. These partnerships came to an end in July last year.