Upcycling T-shirts and football shirts: what one garment produces
Lukas Landefeld · Sales und Development · 6 min ·
Shirts accumulate in large quantities at companies and clubs: event shirts, team clothing, promotional shirts from campaigns, jerseys from expired seasons. Unlike with banners, here you count in garments, not in square metres.
What a shirt yields
A single shirt or jersey makes one of the following products. The area of a garment is the figure on which everything else depends.
| Product | Units from one garment |
|---|---|
| Drawstring bag | 1 unit |
| Cushion | 1 unit |
| Neck pillow | 1 unit |
| Seat cushion | 1 unit |
| Snood | 1 to 2 units |
With smaller products one piece is used several times over.
| Product | Units from one garment |
|---|---|
| Sleep mask | 3 to 5 units |
| Packing bag or glasses case | 2 to 10 units |
| Scrunchie | 10 to 15 units |
For products that need several garments, the calculation works the other way round.
| Product | Garments needed |
|---|---|
| Toiletry bag | 4 to 6 garments |
| Pencil case | 6 to 8 garments |
Why jersey fabric and technical fabric allow different products
T-shirt fabric is elastic, jersey fabric is light and quick-drying. Both are unsuitable for stiff bags, but interesting for anything worn on the body or that needs to stretch. Snoods, scrunchies, sleep masks and cushions work far better in these fabrics than in banner material.
If you want a bag that holds its shape, you need reinforcement or a different base material. What else can be processed is set out in the overview on which textiles are suitable for upcycling.
What happens to the print
On event shirts the print usually sits in the middle of the chest or the back. When cutting, you can decide whether it stays visible. A visible print makes the product recognisable; a concealed one costs yield, because less area per shirt can then be used.
With jerseys the value lies in the print
With club jerseys that is the whole point. Squad number, player name, sponsor logo and sleeve patch turn a standard product into a collector's item.
When cutting, this can be worked towards deliberately. For fans, a drawstring bag with a visible squad number is a different thing from one in club colours. It takes more work, because every piece has to be aligned individually, but it raises the value considerably.
Anyone who wants more uniform products works with the unprinted areas or sorts the material by colour beforehand.
The quantity calculation
Our minimum run is 250 units per product. So for 250 drawstring bags you need around 250 garments, for 250 scrunchies about twenty are enough.
At clubs this is the most common sticking point, because a single season's set is rarely enough for drawstring bags. There are still three ways to get there: pooling several seasons, going for small-format products, or combining jerseys with other club material such as banners and flags.
What others have made from it
For 1. FC Nürnberg, drawstring bags and cushions were made from jerseys. We have also processed club material with Hertha BSC, TBV Lemgo, the Telekom Baskets Bonn and the BR Volleys.
The recurring effect: the products do not work as a way of using up leftovers; they work as a range in their own right. Because every piece is a one-off and the run stays limited, there is demand that standard merchandise does not generate. Merchandise from old club materials sets out how to plan a saleable range from this.
Materials and products