OKAY! No more spending starting NOW...

Wait! Okay maybe after I this:

Southwestern style backpack from Santokivintage. Price $199

I've been into vintage rug/tapestry purse lately of the IKAT Kilim style ever since I found this one from Dusty Rose.

And I really love bonheur's shop on Etsy. She's made some beautiful pieces over the years.

New Project LIGHT TENT

As I've mentioned before, I do sell vintage items on Etsy. I first found out about this website in 2009. I can't even remember how but I get the feeling that I might have been thinking a lot about starting a shop there before last winter. In any event, I started selling in late February of this year. I had a different shop that I do now and it was more for my handmade items than for things of a vintage nature. It didn't go well for me and truth be told I don't think I would like doing it. I kept imagining scenarios where I would get maybe 10 orders (which I never did of course but just humor me) and then have to make the same thing over and over again! Talk about boring! So I guess I like the design side of business more than the putting-things-together side. This doesn't count for the first few times though. I could make something I design probably four times tops. I think efficiency in design is important.

Selling vintage is a much more pleasant experience for me. And I have a lot of confidence in my future as a seller of vintage things. I've never had a ton of confidence in my design capabilities. I don't tend to do well with designing mass marketable things. I think I may be a good artist. I think I have very eccentric tastes so when I design something it might not be attractive or marketable objectively but it might be pretty to me.

So anyway, I've been thinking of a way to make it easier for me to work and take pictures at any time I want. I've been thinking about light boxes a lot lately. I would think having one would make it so convenient to photograph anything I sell. So it wouldn't matter if it were cloudy, I would have my light box, or light tent (which would be way better).
    Searching for fabric I ran across some rip-stop nylon which is supposed to be a good diffusive material that is also heat resistant. I have some metal poles around the apartment from my boyfriends abandoned rep-rap that I might be able to use for the support. So the only thing left to figure out now is how to make it collapsible because space is precious in a studio apartment shared by two people.

Why does everything I do HAVE to be so complicated?!

How shopping for VINTAGE clothing can be REALLY hard.

photo courtesy of creative commons

    I sell vintage clothing on Etsy. The things that can be seen in my shop Say It Ain't Sold! Vintage, are acquired from a variety of sources, and as unremarkable as this might sound, The Salvation Army, is one of them. So I was in there today on a whim because I was looking for some cheap pierced earrings that hopefully had glued on post backs which could be removed. I needed them as replacements for screwbacks for some adorable unsigned Merriam Haskell earrings I found on Etsy.

     I didn't find what I was looking for so I began hunting for some things for the shop. About half an hour into my search I began to get frustrated and I almost gave up. I know I can't be alone in having
the problem I was having. This problem should  provoke many amateur vintage sellers, the problem being: Is what you are buying to sell really vintage?
    Let's face it, clothing that you can buy out of a store or online, clothing, that was manufactured within the last two years can be really cheap. So I'd like to have the piece of mind to know that when I'm asking a premium for something that can be found at any store it's because it's vintage (though the ethics of buying pre-owned clothing period is a conundrum which I'm sure many people are aware of and is something that I might discuss in a later post). So when I'm hunting for authentic vintage clothing I sometimes find it difficult to determine if what I am looking at is vintage at all.
    If you have ever been in a big box place like the Salvation Army you know that they can be overwhelming in terms of the amount of crap I mean things that are there. Though I will say I've never been to any Salvation Army outside of the Chicagoland area (they have them all over the world) so I am only familiar with the starkly lit, the Jesus-Bop, the gray speckled white vinyl floors, and uninspiring metal display racks crammed with clothing, that I have seen at the locations in Chicago.
Perhaps it would be cheating to ask if they could have a department, if you will, for only vintage things? That way it would take the guesswork out of digging!

Survey Results for Buying Vintage!

Buying Vintage Survey

Survey results imminent I promise!

So it's taken me an embarrassingly long amount of time to publish these results. I've got them all up on a spreadsheet and nicely sorted out into graphs and things. Now I've got to figure out a way to get them on here.

Dreams

Sometimes my dreams are so real, or they correlate so closely to my desires, that I have to confirm whether the event in the dream actually occurred. For example, I dreamt last night that one of my mom's prints, that I currently have listed in my shop (which my mom really wants me to sell) acquired a heart (for sellers on Etsy this is good because the garnering of these means that someone likes your item and wants to remember). When I looked in my Etsy shop this morning there is no such thing. It kind of scares me sometimes because these aren't outlandish phenomenons they are subtle, and believable.

Sometimes I even dream about past events or I dream about about the aftermath of embarrassing events. I remember I used to read a lot of epic novels in high school. I don't remember my professor ever saying anything about it to me. In a dream my dream teacher said something really incisive and was so spot on as to what I thought he might have been thinking about my underlying reasons for reading all of those books.

Say It Ain't Sold! Again?!

I'm really greatful for the sale but I hate filling out customs forms! Someone just bought something from my shop that lives in England last week and I just was able to ship it off yesterday. And guess what! Someone else just bought something from my my shop from that same country.

The Evolutinary Psychology of Shopping

"Here's a woman,
she's shopping again
there's no point
trying to understand this"

When I was riding the bus home one day I saw this quote on a shopping bag someone had. I can't, for the life of me, remember what store the bag was from; I do remember that the words were white and they were imposed over an image of a woman from the shoulders down with a multicolored striped dress. I do remember being disgusted by the quote and I do remember why. I would of course feel more comfortable talking about this if I remembered the brand, but since I don't, and I'm not incriminating anything, I shall progress. 

The company might for all I know be an okay company, though the chances of this being the case I think are slim. (and by okay I mean have Fair Labor certified clothing, have eco-friendly sustainable manufacturing processes, maybe be worker owned, etc.) I know for a fact that it was a big brand located on the Mag Mile. I do remember thinking that it wouldn't have been so bad if it were a company like Patagonia, at least something that I could relate to, but I felt that the words were first both enabling and encouraging mindless consumerism and secondly that they were an opportunistic copout for feckless humans (that most of the time cannot help themselves when it comes to pretty things).

I felt that it was enabling the belief that shopping is an accepted habit that one doesn't have to understand. That the Patagonia retailer tries to be socially responsible is something that I can relate to. In the unlikely event that one of their shopping bags were to feature words such as these I would perceive them as an acknowledgement of peculiar human characteristics. 

Please humor me because most of the time I feel like I'm beating a dead horse by talking about this stuff. Most people know about what is "right" and what is "wrong" so to speak and once they know the difference it feels redundant and preachy to speak about any particular issue. But even though I hate redundancy, I like to write and it is part of my character to write about these things, so I shall continue to do so.

Survey Results COMING SOON!

I've been in the process of transferring the results of the Buying Vintage survey to open office spreadsheet. Survey Monkey had the option of letting survey participants see the results but there is a subscription fee of $20 per month. Luckily, I found that I could create charts and graphs by using open office (which is non-proprietary and free) spreadsheet.

I've made two charts so far and I must say, they look pretty professional. It kind of makes me laugh that I am using these hardcore graphs to record this data but the fact that I can change the coloring of the sections takes the edge off.

I honestly don't know where these surveys are headed. I'm not trying to prove anything. The process of making them, blogging about it, and interacting with vintage sellers is something that I find fun and interesting.

Where Is My Money Going?

creative commons photo

In a recent post I wrote about vintage shopping and the potential of it to be guilt free. In the same post I also mentioned that buying pre-owned clothing could mean buying things that are without dirty externalities. As you may or may not know, an externality is an unintended "cost" or "benefit" which is not factored into the price of a purchasable good. If an entity (let's pick on the big-bad-wolf, a CORPORATION!!!), as a result of doing what it has to do to make money effects something or somebody negatively or positively (esp. negative) it is not paid for. Externalities are the effects on things that are undervalued.

So, when buying pre-owned things you would think that you are not contributing to the psycho/physical effects of sweatshop labor or to the effects that manufacturing has on the environment, among other things.

I might have continued to hold this belief had I not had this niggling fear that my efforts of buying pre-owned clothing were not guilt free. The loophole or catch I realized is the merchant.

So, my question was and is:
What do the sellers do with the money? Do they use it to buy new things? Are my buying practices only enabling those that have no ethical compass? So I decided to create a little survey to send to the shops that I buy from on Etsy (an online marketplace).


Yesterday, I sent out the survey to some 50 shops (In the survey introduction I originally said 100 but that estimation was a bit overblown since I had not factored in that my feedback rating - which is over 100 on one account - includes feedback from sellers that I I bought multiple items from and some things handmade i.e. not vintage and some from suppliers and I did not send the survey to these shops). I am still collecting responses and I will be writing an article which I will share the survey results.

My motivation for writing a survey is because I want to get an idea of where my money goes.

So Where Is Clothing Going?

So, for me a noticeable habit of wanting to buy pre-owned clothing really took hold back in the spring of 2008 when I was overseas on a study abroad program for college. I don't think I was disillusioned with "capitalism" or whatever kind of system we have now a-days I think I was more concerned about the environment.
In trying to remember who I was back then I look at what I have now in my closet. I did buy a lot of vintage things and things from outside markets which are very plentiful in London. I remember making a promise to myself that I would buy one thing from a thrift store. One day during my stay I honored that promise by purchasing a beautiful lustrous silk pencil skirt in the loveliest shade of green. I can't remember the name of the shop but I do remember it was an antique store which sold clothing once owned by the upper class and aristocracy. The tag said it was owned by a member of the court (picture coming soon). I think I paid like 10 quid for it (this was a lot more back then).
In 2009 I still had a soft spot for vintage clothing but I was not committed to buying it 100% of the time; I think I might have been living ascetically because as a result of my of spending habits while abroad. As far as buying pre-owned clothing I mainly had purchased things online from Ebay and from local thrift stores. I can't remember whether I was frustrated about the dearth of places to buy clothing from. In the winter I got my second wind and I haven't looked back since.
Nowadays I am fully committed to buying vintage clothing 100% of the time. I think it is a very sustainable way of buying because it has the potential of being guilt free. Buying used clothing has fewer externalities as well and if you buy from a thrift store you might be paying for those externalities because some thrift stores function as charities. The vintage clothing industry has the potential to be a real contender in the global economy.