Day 7: I didn’t want to write this morning because I have been really tired for some reason. After a cheery encouraging message from Laurie, I decided to keep the morning trend of writing.
Buzzed through emails on my iPhone this morning from bed. I feel like it helps to get through it quicker on the phone because you can only see the message as text. Even so, ASOS still gets me with their subject line: “The 4 dresses you need now”.
I need to know what dresses I need now!
Opening the email on my iPhone I see these numbers:
Left: ASOS Asymmetric Body-Conscious Dress
Right: ASOS Textured Cut Out Midi Dress
Fashion Math: Modern Cuts + Asymmetry = A Wonderland.
I run through the email as quickly as I can and and pin several things.
Then to ebay again to see I’ve sold 4 items. Hooray! My junk room will soon be my fabulous arts and crafts room / office. Print packing slips and get the items ready to ship.
Lately, because of this project, I’ve been doing a lot of self reflection about why I’m a chronic shop-o-holic. During a recent spring cleaning expedition into my closets of Narnia (yes plural, I have 3 dedicated to clothing) as well as my drawers (there are 22 in my home that contain clothes) I realized I have a lot of duplicate items especially of the basics. So perhaps I just keep over buying because I don’t have a good visualization strategy. Visualization may be the key to everything! If I have a catalog of everything I own, I can easily mix and match items and create outfits without much effort and understand what I already have so that I don’t buy duplicates. If I find a mobile app for this, I can take this with me when I go out shopping to compare my in store wants with my current catalog.
With this same thought last year, I started an inventory of everything in my closet. (This was “like totally” inspired by the movie Clueless”)
The goals defined:
- It will keep me busy
- It will help me clear stuff out
- It will show me how many duplicate items I have
When looking for an app, I wanted something that had a really clean UI. After browsing the App Store I settle on the Closet+ app. The design is super simple and focuses mostly on the photos you take yourself.
Key features:
- There is a calendar function for keeping track of when you wear each item to make sure you’re cycling through clothing on a daily basis
- There is a cost per wear calculation per item, so you can justify those pricy things that you will wear all the time.
- Allows for favoriting and pre-generating outfits to wear later.
- Great configurable grid view via pinching and expanding
Not only that, I have a beautiful mannequin to take photos of my clothes on. I picked it up at a boutique’s going out of business sale. I had been lusting after their mannequins for a couple years before they went out of business since they were exactly my size.
The one negative is that the app doesn’t have an official iPad version. I simply have been using the 2x feature on device to have a nicer view of my closet collection.
The results ended up looking like this:
My Closet+
When I first started this project it did curtail spending habits for about a month since I didn’t want to do the work to photograph new items. Unfortunately, this trend came to an end as later on I could not keep up to date with the influx of items I was purchasing. However now that I’m working on this 40 day project, I’m thinking I need to get back to it. Visualization will help me in the long run to buy less in the future, and also be able to justify more expensive items that will be higher quality, last longer and be used more often.
Bought: 0
Pinned: 5
Sold: 4
Returned: 0
Received: 0
