but not having a cushion of money in your bank account is a scary thing and at any moment you can go out of business. that is no longer their fear. this year project repat is on track to do nearly $3.5 million in ref yvenue and the best part today they only have themselves to answer to. we created the business that we love and know they re comfortable running and as a boot strap business we don t have investors tell us what to do, investors saying you should cut your costs or pay your workers less or outsource or whatever it is, because we run our own business and we kept control of most of our business, so we get to make the decisions of what we want to do. as we just saw in that piece, being forced to boot strap really makes you think about your decisions. you have to be smarter where you spend your money when you don t have money to burn. for those entrepreneurs it worked out. in south carolina we met the owner of a mattress company who also had to think hard where to
pounds of textiles a year. they started project repat, which takes all your favorite t-shirts and turned them into a quilt. this year, they re on track to make 30,000 quilts. we thought we d be ready. but demand for our cocktail bitters was huge. i could feel our deadlines racing towards us. we didn t need a loan. we needed short-term funding. fast. our amex helped us fill the orders. just like that. you can t predict it, but you can be ready. another step on the journey. will you be ready when growth presents itself? realize your buying power at open.com.
heather: is it project repeat repat? it is project repat. heather: want to get it right. we can help africa by wearing a cool retro t-shirt? project repat was founded myself and sean two executive directors working near boston. focus on developing work in kenya and tanzania. last summer sean was in kenya with his non-profit organization they were in this awful traffic jam. when they got to the end of the traffic jam found out what caused it. it was an overturned fruit and vegetable rick shaw pushed by a guy that said i danced my blank off at josh s bar mitzvah. every year millions of t-shirts are donated. 5% of those shirts are re-sold here in the united states. the other 95% are sold to. shirt middlemen to take these shirts to the developing world