The Project Repat Story
The story of Project Repat begins with two twenty-somethings, both executive directors of Boston non-profit organizations looking for a new ways to fund their work in Africa. During a trip to Kenya, one of them gets stuck in a horrific traffic jam, only to discover the cause of the accident: an overturned fruit and vegetable rickshaw owned by a man wearing a t-shirt that said “I Danced my Ass Off at Josh’s Bar Mitzvah.”
In January 2011, Sean Hewens and Ross Lohr launched Project Repat, a social enterprise to support secondhand t-shirt businesses and artisans in Kenya. The friends traveled to Nairobi’s Gikomba market, the largest secondhand market in East Africa, where they picked out t-shirts to re-brand with a Project Repat stamp and sell in the US and filmed a documentary entitled “I Didn’t Dance My Ass Off At Josh’s Bar Mitzvah.”
The majority of t-shirts don’t end up in Africa as charity, but in massive secondhand markets as part of booming local economy that provides jobs for millions of Africans who are selling, cleaning, and tailoring our castaway clothing. Sean and Ross were delighted to discover artisans creating completely new designs out of our old t-shirts. These modified shirts became part of the Project Repat “Refab” line, and the inspiration for a new model: partnering with artisans in Kenya to make completely new products out of castaway American t-shirts.
Supporting fair wage employment opportunities in Kenya is an important part of our mission, and we hope to continue to do so in the future. However, we also wanted to figure out how we can prevent t-shirts from being dumped in the developing world and support U.S manufacturing. With millions of t-shirts sitting in people's closets, or in company warehouses, Repat strives to turn those shirts into fair wage jobs in the USA and a more functional product.
Ross Lohr:
CEO/Co-Founder. Ross founded his first non-profit organization, Newton-Tanzania Collaborative (NTC), as an undergraduate student at Boston University, connecting schools in the United States and Tanzania through a mutual exchange curriculum and supporting literacy initiatives at partner schools in Tanzania.
Ross@projectrepat.org
Nathan Rothstein:
Sean Hewens:
Co-Founder. Sean is the knowledge manager and in-house counsel at IDEO.org in San Francisco. In previous lives, Sean founded Smallbean, a nonprofit social enterprise based in Boston pursuing technology skills education and cultural preservation activities around the world.
Jacquelyn Yau:
Technical Designer and Fashion Consultant. Jacquelyn is a graduate from Boston's School of Fashion Design and is working to reconstruct awesome new products out of old t-shirts. Jacquelyn traveled to Kenya in January, 2012 to work with local artisans and seamstresses to create a specialty Repat line in Nairobi. You'd never believe what she can do with a pair of scissors, a sewing machine, and 500 used t-shirts.
Andrew Bialecki:
All Things Technical. Andrew is the brains behind the website and anything that goes wrong is definitely his fault. Feel free to contact him with any problems. That's what we do. He just loves being pestered by mere technology mortals. To earn money and stuff, Andrew runs Klaviyo.