Socks made from t-shirt scraps

In the summer of 2012, Ross and I launched t-shirt quilts in a national Groupon email. In a matter of days, we went from selling 10 quilts a week to 2,000.

It wasn’t perfect, not at all, but we quickly figured out how to ramp up production and start a real business. But all those t-shirt quilts meant that all of a sudden we had a lot of t-shirt scraps. And they were piling up fast.

How do you recycle textile waste? It was not easy then, and it is actually still challenging now. But we just couldn’t stand the thought of dumping all that excess into landfills. We wanted to run a business that was truly sustainable.

Back then, we piled up a few trash bags full of scraps, stored them in our parents’ living rooms (thanks mom), and called up a bunch of recycling places all over the state. We found one about 50 miles away, so we piled them into my car and begged them to take our 30 pounds of scraps from a few days of production. They begrudgingly said yes, but in future, we would have to pay.

Pay to responsibly recycle? That was foreign to us, but actually quite common in a world that has not figured out a profitable way to recycle. Recycling only happens if someone in the supply chain can get paid.

Little did we know, over the next decade-plus, we would pay over a million dollars to responsibly recycle our t-shirt scraps. Sometimes that meant finding a truck that could drive 500 miles to a recycler, or other times, it meant driving to countless places and asking if they needed scraps, only to be turned away.

What could we do with scraps other than desperately trying to unload them?

A few years ago, we partnered with the team at Material Return to invest in the technology to break down scraps into yarn. Could we actually upcycle scraps into socks and other new products?

Well, after three years of R+D, we have a very limited run of 100% recycled socks to sell. In fact, it is the most sustainable sock on the planet because it is made 100% from scraps and other recycled material, all of which was collected within a 30 mile radius in western North Carolina. And not only that, it’s also entirely MADE within that same 30 mile radius. No shipping materials overseas for production, no accumulating waste from faraway places — this is a 100% Western North Carolina process.

It is not a cheap sock to make either, but by selling a very limited run and proving there is a market for high quality recycled socks, we can work towards taking our tons of scraps and turning them into sustainable socks at a much bigger scale!

Thank you for reading and supporting us. We hope you love them as much as we do!