Specialist Boris Blijham

About Boris

The story of ThePhoneLab begins with a broken screen and a night out. As an eighteen-year-old student, Boris dropped his iPhone 4 during an evening out in Alkmaar. The next morning, the screen turned out to be completely broken. He found a repair store, but they didn’t feel reliable and the price at Apple was too high. So he decided to try it himself.

Through a tip from a college friend, he ordered parts online and repaired his phone himself. Not only that, he immediately gave his iPhone a completely new look with a green-colored front. That got noticed. Fellow students wanted the same for their phones, and soon Boris was increasingly repairing devices for others.

What started as a handy side income quickly grew into something bigger. With a simple website and some promotion through Facebook, the first customers began to sign up. A promotion through Groupon eventually provided an unexpected breakthrough: while Boris was celebrating carnival, his phone kept giving notifications and customers were at his dorm room door. It soon became clear that there was a huge demand for reliable phone repairs. In 2015, Boris opened the first branch of ThePhoneLab in Amsterdam. The store was given an open workstation so customers could see exactly what was happening to their device.

That transparent way of working still forms the basis of ThePhoneLab. What started with one broken screen grew into a nationwide network of stores where specialists help people every day to get their devices working again. And Boris is still the fastest repairman on the planet (at least with the iPhone 4).