Nathan Rothstein is a co-founder at Project Repat. Repat launched in 2012 trying to solve the problem of too much clothing waste in the world, and a loss of textile manufacturing jobs in the US. 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.  Nathan lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife and two daughters.

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.”