How Project Repat Turns Scraps Into Socks

The Cambridge, MA-based company, which Lohr co-founded in 2012 with Nathan Rothstein, stitches its customers’ old t-shirts—from sports teams, college orientation groups, and what have you—into keepsake quilts, had just ranked 132 on the 2016 Inc. 5000. That recognition was good for business, but it meant more quilts and more scraps, Lohr says. That same year, they ended up getting a mobile storage unit full of the T-shirt scraps. 

“Every year there’s a new batch of graduates and that’s how our business sustains itself,” Lohr says. “But you don’t need the whole T-shirt to make the quilt. “This has always been the thorn in our side, from the very beginning.” 

That’s because they just couldn’t throw the scraps away. Project Repat frequently discusses its pride in being a recycled product, Lohr says. “We couldn’t just, like, have this dark side to us,” where things are actually being thrown away,” he says. 

More than two thirds of all textiles end up in a landfill after use and just 15 percent is recycled, per a study published in Science of The Total Environment. There is a staggering amount of waste throughout the textile manufacturing process specifically, adds Irys Kornbluth, one of the co-founders of Everywhere Apparel. The company utilizes textile waste for their circular manufacturing processes. 

For the first few years of Project Repat, Lohr says they more or less pleaded with facilities to take their T-shirt scraps, sometimes even paying for the truck to bring the scraps down to the very few places equipped to take them, Lohr says. 

On top of that, those facilities usually took larger orders of waste than what Project Repat was generating, so they were competing, more or less, for recycling space. “The supply is enormous,” he adds. 

So Lohr decided in 2023 to launch another company, Scrappy Clothing. He teamed up with the Carolina Textile District—a consortium of textile manufacturers in the Carolinas—with similar recycling problems, and after years of R&D beginning in 2018, that consortium became Material Return, an employee-owned venture that picks up textile manufacturing scraps and waste, spins it into yarn, and brings it back to other clients to be turned into something else. 

Project Repat pays $7,000 a month for Material Return to pick up their scraps, Lohr says. It then sorts and breaks down those fibers from Project Repat and others and turns them into yarn, Erin Kizer of Material Return wrote via email. A company called Nester Hosiery then uses that yarn to make socks. Lohr pays per sock, and sells them for $12.99 a pair as Scrappy Socks, under the Scrappy Clothing brand, which he launched in 2023.

The challenge has been getting people—other than Project Repat customers—to believe in the story enough to buy the socks, which is why for now, Lohr sees the effort as more of a corporate responsibility effort. “We’re not making a ton of money on this thing,” Lohr says. Luckily, Project Repat makes plenty of money. After that first year landing on the Inc. 5000, the company went on to make the list in 2017 (No. 860) and 2019 (No. 2606). 

“We’d love to see this take off on a larger scale than just kind of Repat customers, and we haven’t quite been able to hit that yet,” Lohr says. “Over time, the [production] price will come down, and it will be a more profitable business.”

They’re exploring the idea of a circular sock subscription service—you send customers a pair of socks per time period, then they send them back, the socks get recycled, and they get new ones, Lohr adds. Other companies, like For Days, attempted a similar model, and have also built circularity into their businesses.  

Lohr says his advice for climate entrepreneurs is to balance the considerations of price and sustainability. It’s hard to have a perfectly sustainable product with a reasonable price point on your first try, he adds. 

“I don’t think the average person is willing to spend a lot more [than usual] on products that are good for the earth. We’re living in an Amazon world,” he says, meaning people have been trained to expect things to be cheap.