Re-Shirt’s Maritza Schäfer: T-Shirts Need Water, Re-Shirts Gives Water

Given the current state of the health of our earth, it would be best if we can find systemic solutions that address various problems at once — we need quantum leaps to restore the balance of our planet, our bodies and our souls. This is why we are so excited to be launching Re-Shirt in the U.S.: We get to address environmental issues like landfill use and the water crisis while offering our customers a fabulous way to not only look great in fashionable threads, but also build community and stay connected to each other through the oldest of art forms — storytelling.

Our idea is simple: to reuse old T-shirts and transform them into story-telling artifacts that become more valuable as they get older — Re-Shirts. Re-Shirts represent a unique worldwide economic experiment. An overwhelming 1.2 million brand new T-shirts are sold every day in the U.S. alone. Each cotton T-shirt consumes up to 10,000 liters of water during production. This is not helping the worldwide water crisis, not to mention the landfills T-shirts are disposed of within months of being bought off the rack.

A Re-Shirt is a previously owned T-shirt with an engaging story that will get to live forever at Re-Shirt.net. Someone donates their shirt and tells us its story, we give it its very own orange Re-Shirt Label, a serial number and an online home with its picture and story, and begin its new registered life as a Re-Shirt. Every future owner can now document the experiences they have with their Re-Shirt online and continue the story of that Re-Shirt. The older the Re-Shirt gets, the more valuable it becomes, as the stories that get told by the people who own it add to its fascinating history.

Re-Shirts provide a way to cut down on the number of new T-shirts needed by reusing shirts that may otherwise end up in a landfill.

Because Re-Shirts have a story and a life of their own, people want to hang on to them. The longer they circulate, the more interesting their history becomes. We want to be a part of the solution for the global water crisis by raising the funds to solve it, so we will donate a part of the proceeds to address the water crisis.

To donate a T-shirt, buy a Re-Shirt or simply read about the amazing stories behind our Re-Shirts, learn about Re-Shirt at re-shirt.net. Maritza Schäfer is the CEO of Re-Shirt.