Erkan Karakoc probably can repair your busted phone, and he probably can do it in about 10 minutes.
“I’ve been (at) this 14 years,” says the owner of Cell Fix, a new addition to
Sandusky Mall in Perkins Township, during a recent phone interview. “Back in the day, the same phone was taking me about 30 minutes, 40 minutes. But now, when you’re just doing the same thing and you know exactly what you’re supposed to do, you do it right away.”
And if you’re Karakoc, at least, you do it right in front of the customer.
“If you go somewhere else, they take your phone – or whatever device (you’ve brought) – into the backroom and try to fix everything,” he says.
He doesn’t want to be accused of doing anything to someone’s device they didn’t watch him do, he says, and he wants customers to return to him out of trust.
“I am very reasonable,” he says. “They can check (similar businesses), whoever fixes devices, and they will see my different prices.”
The cost of a repair depends both on the problem – he sees damaged screens more than anything else – and the device model, with Karakoc saying fixes of Apple products range from $50 to $400.
The store also buys, refurbishes and resells used phones.
Cell Fix has bounced around. After starting the business in South Carolina, Karakoc spent several years at Midway Mall in Elyria.
After a move to Mentor’s Great Lake Mall that proved unsuccessful, he opened Cell Fix at Sandusky Mall March 1.
“It’s close to Lorain and Elyria, and I have customers coming from there,” he says.
So far, so good, he says – not so surprising given the loyal customer base he’d built from the Midway years. In fact, while the store was in Mentor, he continued to do repairs when he could out of his house in Lorain.
“The phone number I have right now – we established that in Elyria, and I didn’t turn it off because I knew people would keep calling,” he says.
Learn more about Cell Fix and see contact information at
its Facebook page.