It’s kind of about stuff.
Located near the shadows of the Rocky Mountains, we live in a city that is packed to the brim with stuff. People keep moving here, and with them they bring their stuff. We keep building more houses and more stores to buy more stuff to put in them. Don’t get me wrong, I love stuff.
A large part of why I started this is because I have too much of it.
There are people who need nothing more than someone to come in and make them clean out their closets. It’s so hard to get started sometimes, you just need a little moral support. I did that with a friend of mine and ended up with a bunch of her stuff! At the time I figured I’d make a denim quilt and a rug and whatever else I could think of with that many pairs of jeans.
I asked a couple of people go through and pick what they thought they could use and still had piles. I gave it to them under the condition that if they finished with it and it was still in good condition they’d bring it back so I could find someone else that could use it. I thought that was kind of a good idea. Like a perpetual clothing swap. So it started to develop from there.
The rest well, I’m a junk junkie. Like I said, I love stuff. It finds me. I’ve figured out that I enjoy helping people let go of things and finding new people to appreciate them. I wish I could do it for free; perpetual motion of stuff. Lets face it, stuff isn’t cheap and I need to make a living. So, I’ll come help people get rid of stuff happily and with absolutely no judgement for free. But to be clear, I’m going to try to use it, fix it, refinish or re-purpose it and sell it. Usually at a silly low price, because how many times does something need to be paid for, really?!
If you asked most people what their dream TV/movie home is lots of people say the Brady Bunch House. Mine switches between the house from Psycho or Sanford & Son. It’s like a calling…
Plus I’m all about keeping things out of the landfill right now.
I’m sure some people will read this and say why didn’t you just donate it all? That would have been easy. That would have been the end of it. That wouldn’t have been very much fun!
I’ve been loving and supporting thrift stores since I moved out of my parents house as an 18 year old kid thinking I had it all figured out. (Wow. Was I wrong.) Mostly I loved digging around finding treasures that someone else didn’t want anymore. There is SO much cool stuff out there! I was mostly about the stuff. I didn’t really look much at the clothes unless I found some really cool old jacket that no one (else) in their right mind would wear. I have this fun fur leopard print swing jacket that is AMAZING…
Anyway… the clothes. I’ve found myself in a lot of different spaces and places in my adult life that I never dreamed of as a kid. I was mostly shielded from reality. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I grew up in the mid-level-burbs in a nice house and I don’t recall ever needing for anything. Needless to say I was pretty naive.
Super long story less long, I found myself at some point in a job finding program that set people up with a voucher for a thrift store to get decent interview clothes and enough to keep you going for a week until you started to get a decent paycheck. That experience has stuck with me for 20 something years. I’m just now starting to look around to find out how to work with social programs to get something similar going, but that is one of my goals. I want nothing more than to give back to someone else that finds themselves in a position they never dreamed of. For now, I’m pricing all of the clothes I come across for under $15. Unless it’s a super cool vintage swing coat. I mean come on. Back to that making a living thing 🙂