The weekend of the stall finally arrived!

The market opened to customers from 8am and we were supposed to be finished setting up by 730am. Lucky it was a Sunday morning so we used Saturday afternoon to pack the cars and talk last minute preparations.

We arrived bright and early on the Sunday, coffee in hand. My sister’s partner helped us unpack the cars and left us to set up. Our preparation really paid off here. We set up our racks, table and chairs quickly, then it was just a case of unloading each suitcase of price group and loading the racks.
The finishing touches took the longest as they are wont to do - taping up our signs and positioning items on our table, settling into our chairs with fresh coffees.

It was great to watch other stalls setup around us, we could tell the people who were first timers like us and the people that sold their wares at fashion markets often.

It was a slow start for our stall, it was about an hour before our first sale. We were pretty excited when it happened! We recorded whose item had sold and for how much. We noticed a lot of people would do a lap of the market then go back to the places where they wanted to make purchases.

With about 90 mins of the market to go, we swapped out some of our sale signs for discounts and price cuts. With about a half hour left, we used the signs we had prepared for any offers and bargain basement prices. Many other stall holders did the same, not taking the items home at this point became more important than the price!

The market success was a bit of a mixed bag. My sister made a clear profit, and I made a loss considering the stall cost and items I purchased on the day, oops!
We went into the endeavour with fun and spending time together our top goals, and if we made some money that would be great. We were pleased with our adventure, but were a bit surprised at the time we didn’t sell more items.

That’s where I think we run straight into the problem of fast fashion, fast fashion prices, and the impacts they're having on our clothing lifestyle.
Why would someone spend $20 to buy a secondhand dress from last season when for the same price they can buy something brand new and in a current trend? Some stallholders at the clothes market clearly didn’t care too much about the clothes they were selling, they were poorly presented and not easy for people to sort through and appreciate the pieces.

We had the right idea trying to keep items out of landfills by selling secondhand, and the buyers have the right idea too. It’s just difficult for all of us to contend with brand new clothing at such low prices.

We decided to follow up the market with an online attempt at selling the clothes we had left. I put together size bundles of like items and started the pricing at what we had started with at the market. No interest. After a week, I cut 25% off the price and sold a bundle or two. Another week and we were at 50% of the price, then down to just 20% of the price.
I was no longer surprised by now that these clothes weren’t selling.

There's a local clothes recycling bin near my house and that's where the remaining clothing ended up. The bin says that whatever donations are received are sorted into wearable and resellable items, and items that go straight to recycling. It's a sad ending for clothing that is unloved.

What an eye-opening adventure and an intriguing look at the lifecycle of some of our clothing after purchase! The mixed success of selling and donating clothes has served to reinforce my sustainable purchasing and maintenance habits. Buy little and well, and spend the time to care for your clothing. Loved clothes last much longer than unloved pieces ever will. 

My sister arrived at my house a few weeks after we had decluttered her wardrobe a second time. Although we were almost ready to hold our stall there was still so much to do!

The focus of this session was preparing for the actual day. I had added a handful of items to my sister’s clothes so we had our stock, now we had to make it into something cohesive and manageable.
I had spent some time researching selling clothes secondhand and had learned about how to approach pricing, stall setup, and presentation. Like any new topic, details quickly become complex and you fall into a whole new world you never knew existed before! Armed with this knowledge, we chatted about the preparation as we worked.

We started by sorting items into sizes. As we went a few high quality and brand new with tags items went into a separate pile as they would have higher prices than the rest. We had borrowed and purchased secondhand a few portable clothes racks and gathered all the spare hangers in my house. We started at the smallest size, hanging or folding as needed, and talked about what price we thought should go on the items.

What we ended up with was sections sorted by price and by size. We had one rack for about $5-$15 and a larger rack for $20-$30 items and the higher priced section. The remainder of accessories and very cheap items we planned to set out on a table and basket. Now we had the clothes organised, the next step was the presentation.

With reuse top of mind, I brought together all my coloured cardboard, pens, scissors and safety pins. We got busy making bright signs with our prices and commonly used market terms, and we worked on individual price tags for the high quality items. Although we had been having fun the whole time, this part of the preparation was the most fun! We got to play with words and colours, and used our neatest handwriting. 

We tried to be realistic with what people would pay for second hand items and being in this mostly for fun, we decided we would be open to all offers. Not having done this before we prepped some extra signage to use in case we wanted to halve our stall prices or similar. My research beforehand had taught me that the secondhand clothes market is a pretty tough place to make money, as people do not value clothes like they used to. More on those observations and more in the next and final post in this series - the stall results!

The last step for this day was to actually book the stall! We picked a date about a month later, at a time of year we figured would be reasonably mild so cold or heat wouldn’t drive people off. The pandemic was a factor in our thinking too, it was a Covid-safe event but another month out from lockdowns and clusters would help people feel more comfortable to come out and shop sustainably.

We packed up all our market goodies and eagerly awaited for the market stall weekend to arrive...

After our clothes selling plan was hatched, the first step was to do the decluttering work to get the items that we could sell. This was done in two parts. I made some interesting observations between the two sessions, which you'll find out more about below.

I arrived at my sister's house for the first decluttering session with a few items that I knew would come in handy. Various cloth and plastic bags to hold the clothes, sticky notes, and pens to mark our different piles. My sister had taken all her clothes out of her wardrobe and drawers and piled them onto the spare double bed. The whole bed was covered, but compared to pictures I'd seen on the internet of people decluttering their wardrobes, this was not going to be as big a job as some of those!

We set up in each corner of the room labels and bags for selling, donating, mending, and keeping. Anything for the trash went straight into the bin, and there were only a couple of items in the end that were so worn out they had to be thrown away.
My sister and I sat on opposite ends of the bed and started working through the clothes pile. My sister would make a decision, and I would put the item in whatever corner it needed to be in. We talked a lot about clothes, style, sewing, and one particular mess of a dress that had been bought online from a fast fashion website that could not possibly look good on anyone because it was so badly made!
My job was to move the clothes into the different piles depending on where the item was going next. More importantly though, I was there to encourage and support my sister during the first time she was decluttering with intention. It can be difficult to hold space for someone needing to decide what to do about an item, when you're not the one attached to it and have had it in your house for who knows how long. I was tempted to talk more about the negative environmental impacts of fashion, and had to remind myself that what we were doing together was a great step towards my sister learning to shop and live more sustainably. It was a great time for me to practice holding space and supporting someone in learning at their own pace.

The session took about a half day, and once the pile was gone we spent a bit more time hanging items that were heading back into the wardrobe and folding items heading back into drawers. We decluttered about a half dozen bags worth of clothes. One bag was coming home with me to mend items that would then be kept or sold, one bag was heading for donation, and the other bags were all for our market stall! My sister's clothes spaces were still quite full, but were no longer stuffed and couldn't be closed!

The second decluttering session was not originally in our market stall plan. We had procrastinated on booking the stall after the first session and as a result several months had gone by. Dare I say, more like half a year or more! We were talking about getting into action and booking the stall when my sister said that she'd like to do another decluttering session first.
She had noticed some of the items she kept because she loved them or wanted to make the effort to wear, she had just not worn and they were taking up valuable real estate in her house. This in itself is a great reason to consciously choose what clothes stay in your closet - it helps tune you into what you actually wear and love as opposed to what you think you want or should keep.

Procrastination time was over so we held our second session a week or two after our conversation. The pile we started with was smaller than the first, and it became clear to me almost immediately that my sister was not keeping anywhere near as many items as the first time. She made a lot more comments about loving an item but loving others more, so there was no point in keeping it when someone else could enjoy it. We talked more about style, and as much as certain colours and cuts and prints were nice my sister didn't find them as flattering on her as other items she owned.
I was so proud of her for discovering more about her own style and fashion preferences, and for continuing to be committed to disposing of the unwanted clothes sustainably through second hand selling and donating. 

The second session only took a couple of hours. We worked more quickly and now we were gearing up for the stall part of the plan, talking planning and selling strategies helped keep our energy high. The amount of clothes we decluttered was similar to the first session with most bagged for selling this time around.
With the two sessions worth of decluttering together, my sister could now give more wardrobe and drawer space to the clothes she was keeping and really loved and wore often.

Before I headed home, we made a date to meet at my house within the month to do our market preparations and book the stall. Another fun day together was coming soon!

Years ago I discovered Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. It was life-changing for me indeed, and that will be the topic of another post.

As part of going through the Konmari process of decluttering, I went through my clothes and discarded and donated bags and bags of them. Since that first pass, I've been focused on paring back my wardrobe until every piece I own is one that I love and wear regularly. I'm just about there, as now it's only every so often I remove a clothing item because it's no longer being worn, or it has worn out.

Meanwhile, a couple of friends of mine began decluttering their place to possibly make a move interstate. As part of their preparations, they gathered together all the clothes they wanted to discard and set off to sell them at a second hand clothes market. 
My sister and I went along, me to support my friends, my sister to check out what kind of new threads she could get cheaper than buying brand new. And of course, we went to spend a morning together shopping sustainably and generally having a nice time.

A month or so after this outing, my sister asked me to help her go through all her clothing with the idea we would have enough quality items to host our own clothes market stall. She's a fairly regular online shopper and was finding that plenty of new things were coming in and nothing older or unworn was going out.
Seeing the difference I had made in my own wardrobe, my sister was pretty confident I could help her declutter her clothes, and give the support and objective view on pieces that she wouldn't have doing it alone.

With the combination of my sister's unwanted items and the few items I still had to remove from my own wardrobe, we would have a range of sizes and brands that would hopefully bring a wide variety of shoppers to our stall.
​We would get to be creative together getting ready for the market, spend lots of time having fun, and maybe make a bit of money to boot.

So a plan was hatched.