Since then, they have sold over a million t-shirt quilts, preventing over 25 million t-shirts from ending up in landfills, and created 60 textile jobs in Western North Carolina.

In this episode you’ll learn about: 

• Creating an affordable, US-based product – how to build the right team, and ways to scale.
• The impact of textile waste on the environment – how building a US-based up-cycling company can make a positive impact on the environment.
• How to scale an up-cycling business – from farmer’s markets to email and text marketing strategies.
• The difference between a good idea and a genuine business – how Project Repat went from trying to sell upcycled t-shirt bags to selling over a million affordable t-shirt quilts.
• Worker-owned factory models – the importance of hiring workers that believe in your product and vision. 
• Repatriates – how Project Repat creates a high-quality, affordable t-shirt quilt with minimal carbon impact that brings textile jobs back to the United States.
• Facebook Ads – are the glory days of Facebook in the past? Should businesses look to google?
• Fine-tuning your lead generation – finding the balance between social media ads, google, and email marketing.
• Text and email marketing – why a phone number is worth more than an email address.
• Why Project Repat – keeping t-shirts out of landfills and upcycling them into something new that commemorates important dates, times, and events in people’s lives!

Resources:

• Project Repat
• Fall Line Digital 
• Brandeis
• Groupon
• Shopify
• Living Social
• Klaviyo
• Tripple Whale
• Attentive

Connecting with Guest:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Connecting with the host:

• Rebecca Babicz on LinkedIn

Quotables

• 1:39 “Something that was sturdy and well crafted, but also wasn’t your museum-like quilt.”
• 2:49 “There’s traditionally not a great way to recycle textiles, and they have a long history of disrupting economics in different countries and also adding a lot of textile waste.”
• 7:47 “There’s about 2 billion t-shirts printed in the US every year, and 96% of them are made overseas.”
• 8:04 “T-shirts become a representation of who you are.”
• 9:01 “What we’ve tried to do is turn those memories into getting people to support textile work in the US.”
• 11:54 “You want workers that you have a close relationship with, that really see the meaning of the work, and they can benefit economically from it.”
• 13:36 “I don’t know if we could’ve started this business now and achieved that scale. Because at that time, a lot of people were trying to raise money to then spend that money on advertising, and instead of raising money, we used Groupon and Living Social as our Series A financing.”
• 28:00 “Most people want to be doing customer service through email, and text, and chat.”