Business Law question (Non-Profit Sphere)

[mamuturkey]

I am a current college student and a member of Enactus, and our project is in relation to environmental sustainability. Our team has the idea of creating grocery bags by upcycling T-shirts and selling them at local stores and larger chains later on. A portion of the proceeds would go toward the non-profit area of our project, aiding a local program that provides resources for at-risk children to succeed.

Ideally in order to obtain the necessary materials for our project we would hold some sort of T-shirt drive at our university or attempt to network with local donation centers, but I am still uncertain about the legalities of reselling a product that could have copyrighted logos on them? If this is not possible to do that would make our business plan much more difficult but I wanted to seek advice on this issue! Any help will be well received, thank you :)

[Owen]

I am a current college student and a member of Enactus, and our project is in relation to environmental sustainability. Our team has the idea of creating grocery bags by upcycling T-shirts and selling them at local stores and larger chains later on. A portion of the proceeds would go toward the non-profit area of our project, aiding a local program that provides resources for at-risk children to succeed.

Ideally in order to obtain the necessary materials for our project we would hold some sort of T-shirt drive at our university or attempt to network with local donation centers, but I am still uncertain about the legalities of reselling a product that could have copyrighted logos on them? If this is not possible to do that would make our business plan much more difficult but I wanted to seek advice on this issue! Any help will be well received, thank you :)

You can sell the t-shirts as long as you're not doing it for commercial profit. If you sell them like a yard sale, there will be no problem. If you're selling them online on something like Amazon, Etsy, etc. (not including eBay), that's not legal.

[turboguy]

Using a second hand tee shirt with a registered logo for your product won't create a problem. The original manufacturer of the tee shirt would have paid the required royalty on the shirt and reselling it won't be a problem. The royalty is on creating and selling the product the first time. Even a store selling the shirt the first time (such as WalMart or Target) has no obligation other then to make sure their source is authorized to use the logo.