It all started with a single t-shirt, back when co-founder Ross Lohr was doing non-profit education work in Kenya. He saw how a lot of excess t-shirts had been brought over outside the US—Kenya being among them—and saw an opportunity to create upcycled products out of them with the help of Kenyan artisans.
By the time they'd begun offering those products in Boston, what they discovered was that while it was an overall interesting idea, what the people were looking for—or mostly requesting from them—was a t-shirt quilt. And thus began Project Repat.
Project Repat is an upcycling company, especially known for their t-shirt quilts, co-founded by Ross Lohr and Nathan Rothstein in 2012. Since then, they have proudly crafted over 1 million quilts from over 25 million t-shirts. Just this year, Project Repat started a new project to further their mission of sustainability by recycling t-shirt scraps from the production of quilts into comfortable socks.
These socks, which are called “Scrappy Socks”, are not only made from a combination of recycled microfibers and virgin textiles but are also packaged in sustainable packaging from noissue—which makes them an absolutely perfect pair! To learn more about Project Repat's behind-the-scenes and packaging journey, just continue on below.
Tell us a bit about your brand, introduce it to the world!
We have been making custom t-shirt quilts since 2012 and have upcycled over 25 million shirts! All of our quilts are made at a worker-owned cut and sew factory in Western North Carolina. We can now turn our scraps into yarn that can be spun into socks.
Tell us about the design for your packaging and how you’re using them?
We wanted people to think of coffee growing from the earth, something that they would not normally think about in terms of clothes being upcycled. We are one of the only places in the US that can upcycle clothes at scale and shred scraps into yarn that can be spun into socks (learn more about it here).
There's too much textile waste in the world, and the US produces a lot of it. We want people to talk about the magic of this bag—that you can divert old shirts from landfills, create jobs, and keep scraps out of the trash. And wear a comfy sock!
What made noissue a good fit for your packaging?
The bags have a gift card for quilts and a pair of our new socks. It's one of the more sustainable socks you can get in the US, so we wanted sustainable packaging as well.
