This week’s episode of the Zero to a Million Podcast with Zach Rego features Nathan Rothstein, Co-Founder of Project Repat. It takes 700 gallons of water just to produce one t-shirt. This reality of wastage, combined with consumerist buying habits of shirts, results in massive environmental damage.

Project Repat aims to reduce this damage by upcycling t-shirts into quilts. They have grown significantly since bootstrapping the business and Nathan shares some key learnings they made since starting.

He shares how employee ownership of Project Repat helps create a successful brand and how they used Groupon as their go-to-market strategy. Nathan also shares how they leveraged Shopify as their main marketplace and continuously tinker with Facebook Ads to get in front of their target market.

Finally, Nathan also stresses the importance of capturing email leads. For a company that sells a niche product, it is critical to nurture interested buyers over the course of a few months until they are finally ready to make a purchase.