If You Must Buy Gifts, Give the Gift of Repair: Black Friday 2025

Environmentally speaking, the best gift to give this holiday season is no gift. But lest you end up branded as a cheapskate grinch, the next best gift is the gift of repair. That might be tools, spare parts, training, or even getting a loved one’s favorite hoodie/boots/vintage game console fixed up as a surprise.

There are a surprising number of ways to weave repair into the holiday season and to usurp the customary orgy of overproduction and overconsumption. Repair as a gift is a smarter, greener, longer-lasting choice, and it can also be more thoughtful, personal, and meaningful. 

We’re rolling out a whole bunch of deals, so you can gift repair without breaking the bank.

The Best Toolkit for Repair Noobs

For the one with a pile of broken gadgets…

An Essential Electronics Toolkit will help get them back in working order.

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The most obvious repair gift is to buy somebody tools. A good set of tools makes repair enjoyable, and will last for years, keeping all kinds of things out of the landfill along the way.

The Essential Electronics Toolkit comes with a lifetime guarantee and contains everything you’ll need to fix most everyday electronics and also a bunch of household appliances. Want to open up an iPhone? A Nintendo Switch? An Xbox controller? This kit’s got the bits you need, plus pry tools to coax open stubborn adhesive.

If the giftee only uses this to swap out their phones’ dead batteries and broken screens over the years, then its job will be done.

The Best Toolkit for the Expert Repair Nerd

For the one with substandard tools…

Give the gift of a high-quality kit that’ll fix everything in their lives, with a lifetime warranty.

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If your target giftee is already handy, then you could splash out something they will be able to enjoy for, like, ever. 

The Pro Tech toolkit and its pared-down cousin, the Pro Tech Go, are perennial winners. Pack one of these for an electronics repair job and you’ll almost never need anything else. 

But as a self-confessed repair nerd, the gift I’d go gaga over is the FixHub Power Series Soldering Toolkit, which comes with all the solder and wire cutters and safety glasses you need to turn the corner of any table into a soldering station. If your giftee doesn’t need all those bells and whistles, you might go with the pared-down FixHub Portable Soldering Station, with just the iron and battery pack. It’s got so many neat usability and safety features that soldering repairs become something fun rather than something you put off until you have no choice. (Don’t take my word for it; Time magazine named it one of the best inventions of the year.) 

For the one who’s ready for serious soldering…

Our award-winning soldering iron, a 100-watt battery pack, and all the accessories.

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The Gift of Spares

Okay, maybe you don’t have anyone on your list that’d geek out about a new soldering iron. But do you know anyone who’s complained about their phone battery dying too fast? Has your mom been scrolling around the cracks in her screen? Were your brother’s dreams of becoming a TikTok star smashed when his camera lens shattered on the curb?

You don’t have to buy them a new phone to be their hero. Just give them a new battery, a new screen, or a new camera, and their old phone can keep on trucking. Old phones, especially iPhones which get software updates for years, are still perfectly capable long after the end of the usual “upgrade cycle,” with the exception of the battery, which is a wear item (and which should frankly be way, way easier to replace). 

Give a kit that includes both the battery and the tools necessary to install it, and either wrap it up and put it under the tree, or perform the repair yourself as part of the gift. Bonus: You can ignore the rest of the family for an hour or two on Christmas afternoon. 

Get a part bundled with all the tools they’ll need

No guesswork. No wondering. Just all the right tools at the right moment.

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Buy Used and Fix It Up

Old objects are as good or maybe even better than new ones, plus they’re cheaper, and have tons of character. An old, dented cast-iron pan, and a road-worn electric guitar both contain dings and scratches that remind you of their lives lived.

So why not buy used? My brother’s kid wanted a play kitchen, and he bought a used one locally, and fixed it up. If you’ve just got to buy a laptop or tablet for someone in your life, consider buying refurbished off Back Market. For clothes, how about shopping on one of the vintage clothing sites like Vinted, Vestiaire Collective, or Depop?

Another option is to repair a loved item and wrap it up as new. Did you know iFixit has a bunch of free clothing repair guides? We can walk you through putting new soles on old boots, or patches on a favorite sweater or hoodie.

You could also repair somebody’s tools. Chisels, saws, planes, knives, scissors, and drill bits all need sharpening eventually, for example. Did you know that even knife sharpeners sometimes need their sharpening stones replaced? We’ve got a guide for that. 

Kintsugi and Other

Kintsugi is the ultimate form of repair. It consists of mending broken pottery with gold-laced glue to literally highlight the mended cracks, and it often ends up more beautiful than the unbroken item.

You could give a kintsugi kit, or buy the giftee a morning kintsugi course at your local ceramics workshop. Speaking of which…

Learning Repair Skills

They say that we should spend our money on experiences, not things. In our case, that experience could be learning to repair. Learning repair skills keeps devices alive and waste out of landfills.

Maybe take a look at the maker spaces in your local area and see if they run courses. This could be electronics repair, but it could also be household repair. Not everyone got pressed into helping a parent put up shelves, or mix putty and replace broken windows when they were kids, and repair is a skill that is easy to learn at any age.

iFixit recently did a repair workshop at a repair event in Madrid, Spain, showing young influencers how to replace the screen on an iPhone. These kids politely listened to my short intro about the importance of the right to repair, but totally came alive when we actually went hands on with a bunch of old iPhones and some Essential Electronics Toolkits.

Most of them had never really considered repairing a phone, but they left the workshop wanting to show off their new skills and fix their friends’ phones. They were also super stoked when we gave them their own repair kits to take away. 

Even more powerful is learning to solder. It’s not hard, but a little bit of instruction goes a long, long way, and once you’ve got the hang of soldering, there’s very little you can’t fix, mod, or improve. I was sick of the battery in my coffee scale dying in the middle of a brew, and when I opened it up I found a comically tiny battery. A quick dig through my spares drawer, and a five-minute solder job later (most of that was spent waiting for my decrepit soldering iron to heat up), and I have a battery that should last a month or more.

And guess what? iFixit has a bunch of soldering guides, as well as a whole section on learning diverse repair skills, from working with plastics to sewing, blacksmithing, software, and more.

Greener Friday

Take a step back, and it’s easy to see that seasonal gift giving is a capitalist construction that urges us into wanton consumption. The worst part is the obligation we feel to participate. It might seem unthinkable not to buy Christmas gifts for friends and family.

But there is a third way. We can ignore the temptations of Black Friday, and the frenzy of the “shopping season,” and instead promote repair, reuse, and sustainability.

Tools, parts, and repair guides empower people to fix their devices, while teaching repair skills creates confidence that lasts a lifetime, all while reducing e-waste directly, and also indirectly by not adding yet more junk to the world.