Connecting Us to Africa’s Untold Stories, One T-Shirt at a Time…cont.

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November 23rd, 2011

Credit: Project Repat

By Anna Derby

This is a continuation of yesterday’s story.

Whether it is through a children’s book or the multi-billion dollar global used-clothing trade, Ross Lohr believes the key to successful economic development lies in creating connections.

Project Repat

Unlike NTC, Project Repat is an idea that nearly sells itself. While they were working in Africa, Lohr and Hewens noticed that the huge used clothing markets were full of awesome vintage t-shirts their friends back home would love. They selected their favorite shirts from a sprawling market in Nairobi and brought them back to the US. Back home, they cleaned the shirts thoroughly and silk-screened each with a logo indicating the origin and date of repatriation. At twenty-five dollars apiece, the tailor-made-for-a-hipster shirts emblazoned with phrases like “Just Add Beer” and “Lady Trojans Flag Football” flew off the shelves. With the proceeds, Smallbean was able to build a computer lab in Kenya and NTC put four girls in Kwala through a year of school. Lohr and Hewens realized they were onto something big and raised enough money through a Kickstarter campaign for a trip back to Kenya to buy more shirts and to shoot a documentary.

The idea of Project Repat was definitely sticky, but also left the co-founders with questions about the used-clothing market in which they were now participating. On their return trip, they met with Maurice Awiti, the Dean of Economics at the University of Nairobi and Lohr was surprised by some of what they learned. “I was ready to go there and be like – we are dumping all this clothing on developing countries, we are destroying local markets, but one of these [used clothing] markets actually creates way more jobs than a domestic textile factory would create. From middlemen to retailers to women who are sewing clothes… and that actually has a really positive net gain for the country.” He also noted that there is more to it than the quantity of jobs created by such a market. “These jobs aren’t factory jobs, these are small businesses. There is a level of empowerment that comes from owning your own business that you wouldn’t get if you were working for some factory in sweat labor conditions. We found that to be incredibly interesting. That tells a unique story about these markets and the used clothing trade.”

On their return trip, they connected with some of the women in the market with sewing machines. Instead of producing new items from scratch, many of these women are modifying the used clothing. One of the hottest trends in Nairobi right now is a shirt composed from three or more used shirts – one forms the body, a second contributes different colored sleeves and a third is used for piping and trim. The result is unique and wonderful. “It’s cool to bring shirts home, but what if we are working with artists there to make new, cool products out of our shirts? You’re not just bringing a shirt home, which is an okay story, but let’s try to add something to that.”

Lohr and Hewens brought some of the modified shirts back and showed them to a local clothing designer. She drew inspiration from the work of the Kenyan artisans to prototype an entire line of new products made from used shirts. She developed some awesome new products – a reversible bag, a circle scarf, even a multi-tiered skirt – each made from six used t-shirts. Lohr is excited to see what the ladies in Kenya do with these ideas. “This stuff they are doing to our old shirts – they are taking what we dump there and doing something amazing.” Project Repat just launched a second Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds for another trip to Kenya. “The idea is to raise money here to go back to Kenya and work with the artists there to set up our supply line. Pay them fair wages, bring these things home to sell them and to raise money for non-profits.” Because Project Repat really exists as a means to raise funds for those nonprofits that don’t sell themselves.

No More New

Project Repat calls its t-shirts “double heroes.” Each shirt the organization sells has been purchased from a small business in the developing world and the proceeds go to support the work of NTC and Smallbean. But it could easily be argued that Project Repat products do much more than that. They create a conversation about consumption. The new products are being launched at the same time as a campaign that Lohr and Hewens are calling “No More New.” They are trying to bring attention to the waste in our culture that leads to 95% of used clothing donations being shipped to developing markets. The idea behind Project Repat may sound a little crazy: take shirts that were produced in the developing world, sold in the United States, donated, sent back to a developing market, repurchased from a local vendor, carried back to the US and resell them to hipsters at a premium to fund non-profits working in Africa. But what an effective – and stylish – way to bring attention to the sometimes convoluted systems we already participate in every day.

And in the end it is still all about connections. Project Repat shows us the connections that already exist, just out of sight. When the high school student in Newton donates her Senior Day souvenir t-shirt to Goodwill, it may travel to Africa. There, a real person will resell it to another real person, who will wear it while going about their day, living the story of Africa that doesn’t usually make it to the media. Now Project Repat is connecting us to that story and giving us a way to make those real people’s lives a little better.

Learn more about NTC at http://www.newtontanzania.org, Project Repat at http://www.projectrepat.org, or support their “No More New” Kickstarter campaign at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/projectrepat/no-more-new-t-shirts

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One Response to “Connecting Us to Africa’s Untold Stories, One T-Shirt at a Time…cont.”

• buy t shirts online india says:

  December 2, 2011 at 12:56 am

  Really this story is very interesting. Thanks for this post it’s very useful to me……

  Reply