Have you ever woke up one morning and realised how much crap you have? It’s time for a second-hand market experience. It’s not just about living a more minimalist life, but also to realise that behind every piece of clothing is a story. Forget about selling item by item… call your friends and organise a second-hand market!
Creating your second-hand market is an experience that we were not even thinking of. We had a friend coming to our place after few years living in Australia, and she had an enormous amount of clothing ready to sell. Same as us, in the last couple of years we had accumulated heaps of technology, gears, and clothes that we weren’t using anymore.
The most stupid part of this is (1) that you have spent money on them initially; (2) they are using a large amount of space (3); they can be hard to sell by themselves; (4) you might think to sell this piece for $2 I won’t even get into trouble.
After looking up some markets on the area and realizing it was quite easy to join one of them as well as over 15 Facebook second-hand groups available in our city, we decided to give it a go!
We started by getting a clothing hanger and heaps of hooks from in which we invested $40. We had some beautiful labels, and we created a legend with the prices so we could easily stick those to each piece (and by the way, people loved this idea!).
When we were in the middle of taking out the stuff, apparently comments about each piece started to occur. The most interesting for us and one of the biggest learning is that each “thing” has got a story behind. By talking about the garments or gears, you start to think deeper about who did give it to you, why, or how much you spent, if you have used it… And by doing so, you somehow demonstrate gratefulness to the stuff you have.
I listened once to a Tim Ferriss podcasts where he was interviewing Marie Kondo – the Japanese tidying master who has created a whole culture of “spark joy,” or in other words “demonstrating gratitude for the things you own before putting them away.”
You might ask: is the time worth it?
We got back around $700, and we still have heaps more to sell!
Sincere appreciation for what we have and what is behind of each product is something we are not taught in the consumer era. We are used to giving to the products a short life cycle, especially clothing. Do you know what is behind of the cotton production industry? If you watch the popular documentary called The True Cost you will understand how people suffer for us to be able to live in the 52 seasons fashion era.
If you want to recycle your clothing, you can give them to the second-hand shops in your city, which is a good idea too! But when you get to the point where you have so much stuff that you can open a market, please invite your friends over and dive into this experience together.
We’d love to hear your experience with second-hand clothing. What do you think? Comment below!
