About Orbit — three showrooms, eleven people, one repair bench

A bright electronics shop with devices laid out on pale wooden tables

One glass counter on Oxford Street, 2016

Orbit began as six feet of glass counter at 12 Oxford Street in Osu. We bought phones, tested them, cleaned them up and sold them again, and for the first two years that was the entire business. Everything the shop does now was learned standing behind that counter.

What we learned is the reason for the rest of it. People kept coming back, and almost never because the thing had broken. They came back because nobody had shown them how to use it. So we started setting everything up on the counter before anyone walked out with it, transferring the photographs, putting the SIM in, getting the email working. It is the slowest way to sell a phone and it is the only one that leaves both sides satisfied.

3

Showrooms

Osu since 2016, Accra Mall since 2021, Adum in Kumasi since 2023.

11

People

Enough to answer the telephone and still have somebody on the floor.

9

Years on Oxford Street

The Osu counter has never once changed address.

4.9

Out of five

What customers give us once the thing is home and working.

Four colleagues around a table with open laptops, in the middle of a discussion

A man in a striped shirt checking a phone on the shop floor

A Saturday on the floor in Osu. Nobody here is paid on commission, which is why you will sometimes be talked out of the dearer one.

Eleven people, and everybody does a Saturday

There are eleven of us. Two are on the road most days, delivering across Accra and Tema and driving to Kumasi when a bus will not do. Three are on the bench behind the Osu shop. The other six are on the floor, in one of the three showrooms, and they are the ones who will hand you the thing to hold.

Everybody does a Saturday, whatever else they do the rest of the week. It is the busiest day of the six, and a shop where the people making the decisions are never on the floor on the busiest day gradually stops knowing what it sells.

A pale wood service counter in a modern electronics shop

Three people behind the shop who open things

The workshop is a room behind the Osu showroom with three people in it, a soldering iron older than the shop, and a shelf of parts taken off machines that could not be saved. Screens, batteries, charging ports, keyboards, fans. Most of what comes in goes out again within the week.

They will also tell you when a thing is not worth mending. A four-year-old laptop that needs a new board is a board with a laptop attached, and we would rather say so at the counter than take the money for a repair you resent by March. When that is the answer, bring the old one in anyway: we take phones, laptops and tablets under five years old in part exchange, test them in front of you, wipe them in front of you, and put the value straight against the new one.

Ask before you carry it in

Free delivery

On anything over GH₵ 500

Pay how you like

Card, mobile money or in four

Two years of cover

Parts and labour, no argument

Fourteen days

To change your mind, unopened

Come and hold it before you buy it

Three showrooms, everything out of its box, and nobody following you around. Or order tonight and have it on a bike tomorrow morning.

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