Transcript
Hi, I’m Alegre from Ember Living, here today to talk about to green your wardrobe. There are some sustainable clothing brands out there such as Threads for Thought or Linda Loudermilk . But those are few and far between. Really the best way to green your wardrobe is to buy used. And you can do it at the traditional apparel stores et cetera but one of my favorite ways to buy used clothing is actually on Ebay. And I figured this out shortly after I had my child and two weddings to go to. And they were both out of state, totally different environments, totally different climates.
And I wasn’t the size that I normally am so I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on that. And for one of the weddings it had to be purple because I was walking down the aisle and there was a lot of purple in the wedding. So, it was so easy to storm Ebay and look for a purple linen dress in my size and get thousands of options. If I had tried to find the same sort of thing in the store I would have spent hours looking for something. You’d be surprised Ebay is a great place to look for these sorts of things. I always go on Ebay too when I’m looking for special occasion shoes for my daughter because the shoes that she’s going to maybe wear one time. So I just go on Ebay, spend 10, 20 bucks on it and I don’t sweat it and then I just donate them. So, Ebay’s a great source for clothes.
If you’re going to buy new, one of the things that I like encourage people to do to prevent people from overspending is buy clothing or shoes or whatever accessory it is and hold on to it for a week before you actually start using it. A lot of times I’ll bring something home I’ll hang it up and then I will force myself to wear anything that’s kind of similar to it and I’ll realize that I don’t actually need that piece of clothing. It was a spontaneous buy that I was interested in at the moment but after a week it kind of loses its luster and then I just return it. It’s better for my pocket book and it’s better for the environment because the clothes that I already have are getting more use out of them. Finally, sometimes there’s fun ways to make something yourself. I call these “design upgrades”, where I’ll take something that’s sort of what I want but not quite and I’ll do a little something to it to make it more special. I recently do this actually with my carry-on bag. I saw this beautiful bag. It was $500. I loved it. But it wasn’t exactly right, this $500 bag. It’s a little too big. Plus, it was $500. So, I was like, “Ha! I thought I could find something similar”. I went on Ebay. I found a brand new bag that cost $26 and then I simply added a layer of craft paint to it to give it a little bit of a sheen, which was the thing that I really liked about the $500 bag. So, for literally a couple of bucks I now have a beautiful carry-on bag. And for more on that bag and other videos on how to green your wardrobe, visit my website EmberLiving.com.
