A team of pub and club DJs are applying their experience of Hull and East Yorkshire night-life to their day job of buying, selling and repairing high-tech gadgets.

Paul Green and Richard Hewick, founders of Stuf, have seen the worst that people can do when it comes to smashing their phones, laptops and tablets – and most of the time they can come up with a fix.

“We work in the pubs and clubs around the city and we see mobile phones taking some real hammer,” said Paul, whose team is completed by three fellow DJs.

“People drop phones down toilets, onto dance floors, in the street and often they can be in several pieces when their owners bring them to us the next day.

“But we can usually get them working again. One chap dropped his phone as he ran across the road at St Stephen’s and it was run over by six buses and a taxi, but we fixed it in about an hour and a half.”

Paul is a former Viking FM presenter, Richard is a former Vodafone business manager and the best friends launched Stuf in South Street, Hull, seven years ago, moving to bigger premises across the road four years ago and also opening a branch in Bransholme.

Paul said: “We thought about what to sell and decided on anything that might make a few quid. We buy, sell and repair stuff, and we dropped the second f and adapted e-bay’s colours to create more of an identity.

“The first shop became so busy that people were queuing outside so we moved here. We still get the queues but customers are more comfortable, and they’re patient because they know we will do everything to help them.”

Referrals come via word of mouth and from the proprietary mobile phone shops if a piece of kit is no longer covered by the warranty.

Paul added: “We are looked upon as an advice centre for phones and other gadgets. If people have a problem we are happy to take a look and see what we can do, and if we can’t fix it we will probably know someone who can. Someone came in and asked if we sold watch batteries. We don’t but we sent them to Bob across the road because he does.

“We all work together round here, working with the other businesses and with HullBID. They’ve cleaned our staff car park a few times, they got rid of the graffiti from one of the empty shops and the Support Officers are very helpful. There’s a good community feel.”

In his own words: Paul Green explains the most common technical problems with mobile phones and tablets:

MOBILE MENANCE – THREE THREATS TO YOUR MOBILE

We see all sorts of drunken shenanigans when we do our DJ gigs. The most common problem with phones is people dropping them down the loo, but we can fix that. Another is the transport interchange sprint when people make a run for it and their phone flies out of a pocket halfway across the road. They always smash when they land, and sometimes they get squashed by the traffic, but we can usually fix them. The trickiest problem is with ladies tucking their phone inside their bra. The technology really isn’t designed to cope with the liquid from all that perspiration, but we can usually sort it out.

KEEP TAKING THE TABLETS – THREE THREATS TO LAPTOPS AND NETBOOKS

They may be called laptops but they’re not really designed to use on your lap because it blocks the ventilation and that causes problems. We get a lot of those. Spillages are also popular, everything from coffee to cabernet sauvignon, but we can deal with that. The biggest problem is children. People give the little ones the gadget to keep them quiet and they usually end up getting dropped.

Stuf
12-14 South Street
Hull HU1 3QH
01482 221014

www.webuystuff.co.uk