I’m a big fan of the idea of thrifting, especially for clothes, and I’ve even given my kids thrift-store gift cards (because they were into it as well), but I always ran into a road block personally: finding thrifted clothes in plus sizes was not easy.
SOLUTION: ThredUp
I’d heard of ThredUp, an online women’s clothing thrift store where you can both buy and sell, but I hadn’t made the mental leap from “hey, it’s online so there has to be a much larger selection” to “wait a minute, maybe they have plus sizes!” And sure enough, they do!
So I trial-ran it to see if it worked as advertised. I’m delighted to report it exceeded expectations: the clothes were very inexpensive, they’re in great shape (some still with tags!), and I easily found four new winter tops in styles and sizes I was eager to try out.
I feel like I can now join my kids in the joys of thrifting and avoid the ills of fast fashion in our quickly heating world.
Even the delivery box and presentation did not disappoint, both in the emphasis on reuse-recycling and the pleasant aesthetic—they’re competing with a retail experience, and I appreciate the effort to make it feel special in order to draw people in.
It should be noted that I’m the furthest thing from a fashion icon—I wear my clothes until they fall apart (next step is to get better at mending!), I’ve never been “a shopper”, and it would have been fine with me if this came in a less snazzy presentation… at the same time, I recognize transitioning folks away from consumerist culture will happen in baby steps and I think it’s smart to make thrifting “pretty” and “cool” while still keeping your reuse/recyclable bonafides.
The thing I care about: do my clothes fit and do they make me look good? Which I think is what lots of people want, and ThredUp delivered that in a way that facilitates reuse at a scale not previously possible (literally for me; I couldn’t find things in my size that I wanted) with one of the major benefits of thrifting: affordability and variety (you’re literally shopping through time, picking up stuff you cannot find for sale anywhere else because they stopped making it years ago).
Note the tags on two of the shirts and the enclosed note from ThredUp with a special thanks for thrifting during the holidays which is a time of lots of extra waste (so true!).
Selling through ThredUp
I also took advantage of ThredUp’s option to sell clothes through the store—you download and print out a label, box up your stuff and drop it at the UPS store. As careful as I am when buying clothes to get things that I’m going to use forever, there inevitably are things that just don’t fit as well or fall out of favor or sometimes never fit at all and still have the tags but I never managed to give them away in my Buy Nothing group or send them to Goodwill. There’s a $14.99 service fee for sending stuff in, but I filled a box and shipped it off. In theory, they will take professional pictures, list it on the site, and if they sell within 30 days, I get a cut. I’ll report back when that experiment plays out, but that’s how they get the clothes that run the shop, so I like the idea of encouraging that, regardless.
Overall, I’m very pleased with the shopping experience and I’m literally wearing the olive sweater right now and love it.
Highly Recommend (I also got my kids ThredUp gift cards for the holidays, which they have in digital form so they would make a great stocking stuffer or last-minute gift).
IMPORTANT NOTE: This is Women’s Fashion
ThredUp is only women’s fashion (they used to have a men’s section but it’s gone now) and there are more online thrifting stores every day, but few for men. The reasons I see given are that men hold onto their clothes for longer and wear them out more before discarding, and there’s an important lesson there. Women drive the fast fashion industry. I blame advertising and culture—the messaging to constantly have new fashions is fierce because it’s insanely profitable (I haven’t even gotten into the labor/exploitation side of things)—and we’re not going to change that overnight. But holding onto your clothes for longer is also a climate solution. Men haven’t been the target of the fashion industry quite as much and so the lack of thrifting options for men reflects that; I think it’s also reflected in men being less likely to participate in thrifting, Buy Nothing groups, and clothing swaps, for cultural reasons more than anything. They may have closets full of clothes they’re not wearing but they’re not donating them either (that’s true in my household!).
A CULTURAL SHIFT
Eventually, I’d like to see thrifting and clothing swaps and Buy Nothing be the primary way people get clothes—there is so much clothing in the world already, and sometimes you simply don’t have use for something that someone else will be delighted to have. If we normalize thrifting, which an online experience like ThredUp definitely helps with, then we get one step closer to a circular economy that minimizes waste and reduces the amount of resources we’re burning through.
I’d also like to see a cultural shift to not just wearing clothing longer (and mending!) but also buying higher quality, sustainably made clothes, that are made from recycled materials using fair trade labor practices—we need a shift in perspective toward clothing as an investment that’s worth the higher cost.
That’s a perspective shift that’s necessary across the board, beyond clothing: the true cost of things is what it takes to make it sustainably and with fair labor practices. If you get something cheaper than that, then you’re externalizing the cost onto someone else… or we all pay for it with a degraded environment. If that means we buy fewer clothes (and other things) but treasure them more and make them last longer, that’s moving everything in the right direction.
Every Christmas, I get new clothes for my three adult kids (including gift cards for thrifting). For several years now, I’ve been scouting out and getting my kids clothes (or gift cards) to companies who are making the effort to make sustainable clothes with fair labor practices.
The gift of not just clothes that will last longer but lessen the burden on the planet? That’s my idea of Climate Conscious Gift Giving.
I hope you’ll give ThredUp (or other online and offline thrifting) a try!
(Note: I’m not getting any affiliate sales or anything like that—I’m 100% trying to move the needle culturally toward a more sustainable world for all of us. Because I live here too.)
What a great idea! Thanks for sharing.