Our Story

Scrappy Clothing Company: Our Story 

In 2012, we founded a company called Project Repat that makes t-shirt quilts. That’s right, t-shirt quilts. It’s a great product – we cut the logos out from your shirts, sew them together, and you have all your t-shirt memories in one place forever. But you know what’s not great? Thousands and thousands of pounds of t-shirt scraps. 

The never-ending accumulation of t-shirt scraps has been a thorn in our sides since we started this business more than 10 years ago. Sure, we could have just brought the scraps to the dump and added to the 5% of waste on earth that is used textiles. But that didn’t sit right with us. 

So for years and years, we begged – pleaded – with textile recyclers to take the unusable parts of our customers’ t-shirts and recycle them responsibly. And we’re proud to say that after making more than 1 million t-shirt quilts, we’ve never added a single t-shirt scrap to the landfill. 

But wouldn’t it be awesome if we could take those scraps and actually DO something useful with them?  

Enter: Scrappy Clothing Company. 

We don’t just produce TONS of t-shirt scraps. We also consider ourselves to be scrappy entrepreneurs and business owners. And we found a worker-owned cut and sew factory in North Carolina that was scrappy enough to manufacture 100,000 custom t-shirt quilts per year. 

So we knew they were the right people for the job to figure out what to do with our scrap problem. And boy, did they deliver. With some R+D funds from Project Repat and the State of North Carolina, the factory developed a process that collects textile waste from their region, mixes it with our t-shirt scraps, break it all down into a fiber, and spins it back into yarn that can be used to make high-quality, brand new products. Now that’s scrappy. 

So the journey begins, with a partially recycled and ‘made-in-the-same-region-the-materials-were-sourced-from’ sock: The Scrappy Sock. 

And look. We’re the first to admit it… they’re not flashy. They look like pretty ordinary gray socks. But our ordinary-looking sock has a little secret: It’s made with recycled materials. And it's just the beginning. We're working with our yarn maker to innovate and make a 100% recycled sock within the next two years. 

One more thing... We know that “sustainable” brands are usually associated with super expensive products. And that’s understandable - it costs a lot to produce well-made, eco-friendly products that don’t destroy the environment and pay people a living wage to make them. We’ve seen “sustainable” socks out there for $20 or $30! 

Here’s our promise to you: A pair of Scrappy Socks will always be affordable.

A SUPER sustainable sock? At a great price? How did a couple of t-shirt quilt guys pull that off? 

Guess we were just scrappy enough to figure it out.