Hipsterwear: Group buys old US T-shirts overseas, resells them here, donates proceeds

Shirts come with tags that tell their stories.

Hipsters with a need for irony are flocking to a non-profit group that's figured out how to get people to buy all those T-shirts nobody wants: Wait until they're sent overseas in charity shipments, buy them back, then sell them here and use the proceeds for non-profit work.

That's the goal of Project Repat, a new Boston-based effort trying to turn old T-shirts into money for non-profit work in the developing world.

Sean Hewens and Ross Lohr, two Americans doing volunteer work in Kenya, got the idea when they started noticing plenty of T-shirts for sale there that had originally been sold in the U.S. In an interview with Universal Hub, Hewens said he was particularly entranced with a T-shirt for sale in a local market that read "I Didn't Dance My Ass Off at Josh's Bar Mitzvah." Hewens was in Kenya working for his existing Boston-based non-profit, Smallbean, which donates computer systems to remote communities on which to preserve their culture and language.

Hewens said that on a trip to neighboring Tanzania, he and Lohr discovered hundreds of similar shirts in a T-shirt market. They bought a dozen to bring back to the U.S. - and got the idea to buy up even more to re-sell back here.

"New non-profits are always struggling for funding," Hewens said, "So Ross and I thought that this idea could possibly generate revenue." Using Kickstarter as a platform to raise seed money for the idea, Project Repat took off, repatriating the underachieving t-shirts to give them a second chance back in America.

Hewens eventually found volunteers who had extra space in their suitcase to bring back more T-shirts. "So far we've sold just under 200 tees. All the shirts come with a repatriate stamp that tells the location of where they came from, when it was repatriated, and also explains the projects and proceeds, " he said. Current proceeds are going to fund scholarships for girls at a school in Tanzania - and to help fund a movie about the campaign, to be called "I Didn't Dance My Ass Off a Josh's Bar Mitzvah."

In less than a week, he said, the effort raised $5,000, enough to start filming in Africa next month and to bring back another 500 shirts. "We want to portray the depth of the used t-shirt market," he said. "So many people in the developing world have these cool hipster shirts, and if we can profile these markets and tell the story of them, we can complete the full loop and feature the whole stories of these shirts, tracking down where they came from in the U.S., and how they got to Africa and back. ... Ultimately, we want to raise enough money to keep donating to the non-profits so it can eventually sustain itself. We want to continue to raise awareness in the developing world and captivate people about this interconnected world we live in to get involved."

Hewens says he's found some pretty awesome tees, ranging from the original Bar Mitzvah shirt to a PBR tee, another favorite of his. Every repatriated shirt is $25. Hewens said he's hoping to get the project better known, starting with an open market in the South End this summer, but eventually into the retail channel that spawned some of the shirts in the first place. Along with this, Hewens has another goal, which he admits is silly. "We'd eventually like to get these repatriated shirts into stores like Urban Outfitters. They are so wonderfully authentic, there are no duplicates, and it would sort of being playing off this whole hipster movement."