Project Repat

Nathan Rothstein and his business partner started thinking about t-shirts in an unexpected place: a traffic jam in Nairobi. His partner spotted a guy wearing a shirt that read "I danced my ass off at Josh's Bar Mitzvah in 1997"—clearly not a local. The absurdity sparked a realization: donated American t-shirts were flooding global supply chains and ending up in landfills. They wanted to find a way to keep those memories in the US.

They started making tote bags and infinity scarves from donated t-shirts at local markets in 2012. But customers kept asking: "Can you turn my t-shirts into a quilt?" Nathan recalls, "We were like, no, we don't really want to do that. That's not that cool." But when nothing else was selling, they figured out how to make an affordable t-shirt quilt. The business model was simple: customers paid $75–$250 per quilt (depending on size), covering up to 30 shirts. At a full-size quilt priced at $130, Project Repat maintained 30% margins by keeping production in the US—specifically in Fall River, Massachusetts and Morganton, North Carolina—using manufacturers that had been hollowed out by NAFTA. With just one part-time employee and themselves, they contracted production only after orders shipped.

In August 2012, with just $8k left in the bank and a few weeks of runway, Nathan was sleeping in their Boston office. Then they caught a break: Groupon featured them as a social good business and didn't take a percentage. "We sold 2,000 quilts in a week," Nathan says. "That put a hundred thousand dollars in our bank account." The scramble was real—they rented a U-Haul, found a manufacturer, dropped off 300 packages with rough instructions, and prayed. Some quilts came back poorly made, but the lesson stuck: they were handling people's memories and couldn't afford quality slips.

Flash sales (Groupon, Living Social) dominated 2012–2013, but Project Repat weaned themselves off as the market matured. Facebook ads became their core growth engine. In 2015 alone, they spent $750k on Facebook and planned to double that. Their system was surgical: use exit pop-ups offering 20% off to capture emails (8–10% conversion), then segment and email via Klaviyo with targeted incentives. From 50,000 emails collected in 2015, they converted roughly 7,500 into customers—a 15% conversion rate. Nathan's insight: "If we gave people an affordable price and heavily discounted often, we could grow the market." November 2015 was their peak—$750k in revenue in a single month. December softened because people needed time for quilts to arrive by Christmas.

By early 2016, Project Repat was on a $7.5 million annual revenue goal (extrapolating from their $750k best month and ~4,000 quilts sold in December alone at ~$130 each). They'd upcycled over 2 million t-shirts since 2012 and remained bootstrapped after their initial $25k from a San Francisco social good accelerator. Nathan credits growth to reinvesting profits aggressively into Facebook—essentially betting that once people discovered the product, they'd stick. The blue ocean was massive: millions of Americans had drawers full of college, sports, and event t-shirts; existing competitors charged more and moved slowly; and no one was advertising heavily. Nathan was 32, engaged, living in Boston, and about to turn what started as a weird quilt idea into a multi-million-dollar mission to bring textile jobs back to the US.