When Habitat wrapped up our recent From Here. For Here. campaign and offered our billboards to the ReStores, ReStore Managers Shel Reinwald and Alex Bertolucci saw an opportunity.
“We looked at Alex’s messenger bag made from a banner and started figuring out how to craft tote bags from the material,” Said Reinwald.
With the ReStore’s mission to support Habitat through selling re-use materials at its retail outlets, making bags from the billboards and selling them at the ReStore’s three locations seemed a perfect expression of this mission. Using volunteers to cut the bags and local company Spooltown to stitch the bags together minimized costs, making the project feasible. Each bag captures a small section of a billboard, such as part of a hammer, nails, a model’s eye or the moody Portland sky. The result is striking, unique, durable bags handy for carrying all sorts of things.
Billboard bags are on sale now at all three local ReStores!
Check out the production of these bags in this video!