Project Repat Giving New Life to Old Tees

Is there anything so personal and so conveying of one's personal story than the t-shirt? We use to them to support our favorite sports teams and musicians. We project our politics to the world on them. We let them say what we're thinking and because it's on a t-shirt it's okay. We basically allow ourselves to be billboards for brands and ideas, and we pay for the opportunity to be used as such.

So since we're paying for that, we obviously feel pretty strongly about the message, whether that message is "Save the Whales" or "I was at this concert when it happened" or "I like superheroes." So why should we part with these favored items just because they've gotten too small (a misnomer, to be sure -- it's always because we've gotten too large), or because you have to make some drawer space for the newer t-shirts expressing more newly acquired ideas?

Ross Lohr and Nathan Rothstein thought the same thing. These things are our memories, a piece of our lives, given form and expression through clothing. To save those memories, Ross and Nathan have put together Project Repat, a way to up-cycle old t-shirts into something new and unique -- a quilt. Think of it as a comfy, snuggly scrapbook that shows all your loves, likes, and snarky ideas on in one patchwork tapestry.

The Project Repat story starts in Nairobi, Kenya, where Project Repat co-founder Ross Lohr was doing non-profit education work. After sitting in traffic for 2 hours, he discovered the cause of the jam: an overturned fruit and vegetable rickshaw pushed by a Kenyan man wearing a t-shirt that said “I Danced My Ass Off at Josh’s Bar Mitzvah.”

Project Repat now has more than 110,000 customers. Since launching, the company has prevented more than five million t-shirts from being dumped into landfills by upcycling them into quilts and pillows.

Overall, Project Repat is a pretty cool idea that I'm happy to promote and tell people about.

I wonder if they have t-shirts.