This year will mark the 9th anniversary of Tournevie. That’s a long time for what essentially started out as a citizen project in 2015. Our goal back then, and still today, was to create an affordable and inclusive place where people can exchange quality tools and know-how to create and fix stuff themselves.
Breaking the status quo
According to our diagnosis, expensive rental services were out of reach for many people, forcing them to head over to hardware stores to buy cheap unrepairable tools, often of inferior quality. Many are ‘disposable’ tools. They are literally made to last a few times before being discarded. Such excesses are, unfortunately, not exceptional but hard-wired in our economy.
We wanted to provide an alternative service: one that by design prevents the mountains of waste our economy generates every day and that massively prolongs the lifetime of products through sharing and repairing. A service that is accessible to as many people as possible, and one that brings people together from all walks of life, language and sociocultural background.
The latter features are not simply a congenial bonus to our project. They are coded in the DNA of this project: while the dominant economic system atomises people and their place in society, we want to humanise them. The dominant way of provisioning today is based commodifying things, people, and even their behaviour and thoughts on the market (think: Meta, Alphabet or Musk and their asocial media).
We on the other hand provide an antidote, one that builds and strengthens relations between people based on mutual trust and responsible stewardship. The precondition for this is that people self-organize and take action to do things in common. In short, instead of commodifying, we are commonifying by pooling resources and talent to the benefit of our members.
Where we are now
We have inspired a good number of projects in Belgium and even abroad to take this approach. The mere fact that Tournevie is alive and kicking after all these years is another testament to its success. In 2023 we had 524 active members in our fold, borrowing 8616 tools or about 165 tools per week on average. That also meant 174 repair tickets for burnt motors, worn out sanding pads and other minor or major damages to our tools. We also added an extensive wood and metal workshop and provide courses to safely use machines.
That is the good news. As we improve our internal processes and our tool inventory, the amount of people joining is steadily growing. The flipside is that it makes the entire project more complicated to manage. This raises the big challenge of keeping this project financially sustainable far into the future. Especially since, for the sake of affordability for our users, we have not changed the prices of our tool library in 8 years, despite price inflation in recent times.
The steep increase in energy prices particularly affected our wood and metal workshop and its heavy machinery. We also became VAT compliant, which effectively reduced 1/5 of our income. However, to continue this project in the future with professional back-up for our volunteers, we need to increase our income. We have little alternative than to turn to our members for this.
Change in membership fees
We decided to tweak our membership fees. The aim was twofold: to provide the organisation with extra income to stay afloat, and to ensure the service stays both equitable and affordable. While some people may use tools a bit more than others, we want to avoid situations where a minority takes more than their fair share. That is why we chose to create 4 different membership tiers, which you can find on our website in more detail, but that can be summarized as follows:
A one month Trial membership for people who need a few tools once or twice. Essentially for small odd jobs.
The one year Bricoleur membership allows for more tools: they can borrow up 5 tool loans at any one time.
The Comfort membership if you need a bit more tools (up to 8) to get the job done.
And a Renovation membership if you need even more (up to 10), and would like to borrow tools for a standard 2 weeks.
The standard loan duration and possibility to extend a loan online for one week, as well as the insurance system for incidental damages, still apply. While there is a cap on how many tools you can borrow at the same time, the amount of loans remains unlimited. We continue to offer a Custom deal if you need tools for longer periods or really big projects.
The new pricing system will apply to all new members. Existing members continue to enjoy their membership until it expires, although we encourage anyone in this situation to upgrade to the new regular membership tier. Every little extra is highly appreciated and helps out a lot to keep Tournevie financially sound ! :)