We find machines worth saving, wherever they are. South African hands put them right. Then they go back out to the people who want them.
Collectors' machines break everywhere: a synth in Berlin, a turntable in Osaka, a box of toys in somebody's garage in Texas. The skill to put them right properly is scarce and expensive in most of those places.
So we bring the work here instead. Technicians and artisans in South Africa do the repair, the service and the finishing, and the machine goes back out to a buyer overseas.
That loop is the company, not the charity section at the bottom of it.
We source damaged, neglected and unloved equipment worldwide. Estates, auctions, storerooms, the back of a garage.
It comes to the workshop. Strip, service, repair, refinish, test. Nothing leaves the bench until it works.
It is listed and sold, mostly to collectors outside South Africa. The money travels the other way.
Instruments and studio gear first, because that is what we know best. Hi-fi next. After that, the things people collect and nobody services any more.
If it was built properly, and somebody still loves it, it qualifies.
The constraint on this business is not stock and it is not tools. It is hands. Skilled technicians are scarce and ageing, and South Africa's colleges finish roughly one student in ten, so a company that runs on artisans has to make its own.
Every technician here trains the next one. Knowledge sitting in a single head is a liability, not an asset.
The bench is in KwaZulu-Natal because the skill is here and deserves the work. If we ever start describing our team as a cost advantage, shoot us.
Structure, since people ask. Inner Pieces is being built as a hybrid: a for-profit workshop with a non-profit public benefit arm alongside it, carrying the training and the apprenticeships.
A workshop that trains more artisans than it strictly needs, and a steady line of machines going out to collectors who would otherwise have written them off.
We will tell you when a repair isn't worth doing. That happens too.