Changing the conversation around custom apparel
What happens to custom apparel when people are done wearing them? Thrift shops can’t re-sell 80–90% of what is dropped off at their doors.
What about printing a QR code on a shirt that shows textile recycling/upcycle options?
I was going through my pitch this winter with an NBA team’s sustainability office over Zoom. For every game, almost 18,000 shirts are printed. How many times do people wear them?
The staff nodded along and seemed genuinely interested in coming up with a new way to tell the post-consumer story of custom apparel.
And then nothing. No word from them.
This was not surprising. We had pitched hundreds of teams and print shops over the past decade.
What happens to shirts after they leave your shop?
It is the dirty secret of the custom apparel industry. What is the plan for shirts after they are done?
Yes, people will pay a lot of money for that Prince Purple Rain Tour Shirt from 1983 (at least I will), but what about all of the shirts that are made for events, reunions, 5K’s,etc? The highest value they have is the memories attached to them.
There are many big businesses that are focused on the fashion resale market, but it seems like there are few conversations around the end of life of custom apparel.
We started Project Repat in 2012 to address this problem- Americans have so many custom apparel shirts in their closet that they no longer wear, but they can’t bear to get rid of.
But after upcycling over 25 million shirts in the past decade into t-shirt quilts, the conversation has not changed. The industry is not slowing down ($50 Billion Market), so instead of fighting it, how do we join them?
This spring we asked ourselves- how do we scale our impact? We also had to stop pitching a dead-end concept.
What if we started printing shirts ourselves and adding our own sticker/label to each shirt?
So much of entrepreneurship is making small bets, and trying to not lose big, while you search for the next idea that can grow your business. I had a half-baked idea, and I reached out to a printer in Michigan, who actually responded, and they were open to collaborating. Just like we created production partnerships for custom t-shirt quilts, we created one for custom apparel.
And then we went back to startup mode. How do we provide a good service? How do we solve problems for people? And we started talking to customers, one after another. 10–20–30. There are thousands of other vendors out there, and we know people have personal relationships with some and enjoy working with many, and so we just wanted to see where we could provide value.
Our goal is to do what we had spent years trying to get the custom apparel industry to think about. What happens to the apparel when people are done with them?
We currently work with Material Return to responsibly recycle our scraps, and hoping to scale our 100% recycled socks made from our scraps too. There are places like Retold Recycling too that offer solutions for excess clothing other than just dropping it off at a thrift shop.
We want to create great apparel for you at a good price, and also help you find responsible ways to recycle it!
