People have started to ask us how we have found our production partners this year, so here’s the tale, but it’s also a story of the evolution of Project Repat:
The story begins with failure. It always does. Failure or customers poor response to the product we were offering them.Ross had returned from Nairobi with dozens of upcycled tote bags and circle scarves made from the some of the millions of American printed t-shirts that wind up in the developing world. They all were somewhat ironic; a Hooters Nashville t-shirt with an Atlanta Braves 1995 NL champs shirt mixed with a Kiss Me I’m Irish shirt made up a circle scarf that we were trying to sell at places like the Davis Flea and the South End Open Market.
When we had the bags laid out on the table, and a cut picture of our mascot, a bearded hipster, every customer that came by, we tried to explain why they should buy this Braves/Hooters/Kiss Me I’m Irish scarf.
We would say, ‘This bag was made in Nairobi by artisans who are getting paid a fair and living wage out of the millions of t-shirts that get donated in the US and then wind up getting sold pennies on the pound to middlemen who then sell it to local entrepreneurs in emerging markets who sell it. In other scenarios, t-shirts just get dumped in landfills or donated for free, which undercuts both the local entrepreneurs and the local industry.’ If they were still listening, which usually they were not, they would start flipping the sides of the bag and scarf and see a shirt that they really liked, and then flip it again, and see a shirt that they just would not wear around the neck. Their faces would light up in excitement to see a Cleveland shirt (where they spent their college years) only to be let down by a Corona t-shirt, which they didn’t like, “If only it said Heineken, I would have bought.’ Each weekend we would march down to the market excited to sell our wears, only to watch this same pattern crush our dreams.
But we did manage to sell some, which as Eric Ries talks about, can sometimes derail the learning that your product is not validated. Slow, below average growth can actually hide the true meaning of what is happening, your product has not been validated and you are going down a dead end. But the light at the end of the tunnel still glimmered for us.
Ross called the production partnership in a treehouse in Nairobi that he had cultivated only a few weeks before, and said, “We’re ready for the other shipment, and I’m wiring you money.” Those bags never came, and the money was lost. But it was a less expensive lesson than dragging our feet down this path for months only to watch the slow speed of growth regress into reverse.
For some reason, mostly naivety and stubbornness, two qualities that makes young people do a lot of the exciting and stupid things in the world, we still believed that people wanted products made out of t-shirts. So many people told us it was a good idea, and some people actually bought it. But were people just being nice? How many more times could we post something on facebook and have only have 2 likes, one from each of our very supportive mothers?
Anne O’Loughlin, who had been running an eco-friendly consumer good product for the past five years, Autonomie Project, thought what we were doing was cool too (maybe), and offered to help us out. She showed us what a lookbook was, and edited our HUB Ventures application. During one of our meetings, we said, ‘Anne, we have have a problem.” She probably knew that already. “ We need to find a US partner that is still about fair and living wages.’ Anne asked, ‘Do you know Proxy Apparel?” Another eco-fashion start-up in Boston. “Well, they do their production at a worker-owned cut and sew cooperative in North Carolina called Opportunity Threads.”
Perfect.
We had samples and templates sent down to Opportunity Threads and started to email back and forth with their General Manager, Molly Hemstreet. She had started Opportunity Threads a few years earlier, and the workers were mostly of Mayan descent, and each owned a percentage of the company. The tote bag and circle scarf they made for us never looked better, and obviously, the only next move was to drive down to North Carolina with a car full of t-shirts, spend time learning who are production partners were, and then driving back up to continue to sell them at markets and try to get them into stores. Seemed reasonable.
This is is the part of the story where we have to get 300 t-shirts in a few days. We already had a good amount that Ross had brought back from Africa, and then we asked Olivia Allen, a Northeastern student to see if she could start a t-shirt drive. Despite there being a blackout at the school for two days, she still collected a hundred t-shirts, and then a few days before we left, we had a meeting with buyers from Whole Foods, set up through Youth Trade. We showed her a bag we made out of second hand shirts from a South Boston print shop, L Street South Boston and Bars of Southie with a scarf that had a Bieber shirt and a Smurf on it, and surprisingly, their answer was this would be perfect for Whole Foods. The buyer also told us she had a truck full of Whole Foods t-shirts which would help seal the deal. On Monday, when we started our descent, our first stop was Whole Foods, only to be handed ten Whole Foods t-shirts.
Since we had applied to an accelerator program in San Francisco, which we had made the second round of, we both got out of our leases, put all of our stuff in storage and our parents basement, and then made the drive down to North Carolina. Again, not sure why we did that.
