There’s a trick to it. The container that you drag onto the repeater needs to be attached to the item. When a little label appears on the repeater entitled “Attach to Item”, that’s when you drop it onto the repeater.
The field itemData.background stores the color in the above example. This is a literal color assignment:
exportfunction repeater1_itemReady($item, itemData, index){
$item("#box1").style.backgroundColor = "red";
}