“What would you like to look like today?” asks the screen and offers me eight choices to pick from:
- a romantic dreamer
- an urban fashionista
- a reckless teen
- a sporty mommy
- a neat housewife
- a naughty girl….
“You order has been submitted and will be shipped in 30 minutes. Thank you for using “My Caprice”.
In only half an hour after showering and breakfast the doorbell rings. I open the door and receive a paper bag with “My Caprice” logo. The bag has the dress and the shoes…
The next day I order a new dress and new shoes. Every day I order a new outfit that gets shipped to my house in a paper bag.
How much do you think this service costs? Where do I keep all the clothes and shoes I order? I don’t keep them anywhere and it costs me no more than a TV subscription. How is that possible?
Once I’ve used the clothes I take them to “My Caprice Clothing Return Drop Box” located at all major intersections of the city. “My Caprice” is one of the many clothing rental providers available in the market. Clothes collected at the drop boxes are shipped to a giant dry cleaning factory where several mega tons of used clothing is processed daily. Once cleaned the clothes become like brand new.
The cleaned clothing is sent to warehouses where it gets itemized and categorized. The warehouses are connected to the central database which is linked to the application running on the terminals installed in every home’s closet. The customers pay a yearly subscription for the service. There are different plans available depending on the clothes quality, designs and target market demographics.The traditional “retail” shopping still exists. However, clothing rental services become more and more popular. How did this happen?
In a country where bad weather lasts three seasons out of four, and driving in traffic is a huge hassle , more and more people preferred online shopping to visiting a store. The biggest issue was lack of storage. People kept buying clothes and storing them in closets. With time, clothes weren’t fitting well anymore, or they were going out of fashion, or people simply became bored with them. Clothes were taking more and more space, producing dust and causing allergies.
Considering the fact that consumers use clothes for a short period of time, quickly replacing them with the new ones, manufacturers realized that quality is not of much importance to consumers. Eventually, the quality of clothing became so poor that after two washes most garments were discarded, causing significant harm to the environment.
This is when a group of scientists decided to popularize the concept of mass clothing rental. The idea mostly favoured by women thrived on the fact that every woman’s secret desire to wear a different outfit every single day of a year.
They capitalized on the fact that women don’t buy clothing for its own sake. They buy the looks created by the clothing. Companies like “My Caprice” were able to meet that demand.
Any radical new idea will receive its share of criticism. Some people consider it inappropriate to wear used clothes due to religious, cultural and hygienic reasons. That is utterly strange as they share lots of other things with strangers every day. When they go to restaurants, they eat food from the plates that were previously used by others. When they stay in hotel rooms, they sleep on top of bed sheets that someone else had previously slept on. When they are admitted to hospitals, they wear robes that were worn by many others…Eventually even the most raging opponents of this idea had to change their mind. Mainly, due to the environmental benefits of the new concept. Reusing items means less waste, less cleaning substances and less plastic ending up in landfills. The quality and durability of clothing also improved. They started using more natural, eco-friendly and recyclable materials, which helped improve people’s overall health and well-being…
I kept contemplating about other long-term benefits of this idea, but suddenly I woke up from my dream. I opened my closet and saw how many clothes I had in there... For the last three years I have been obsessed with buying new clothes calling it my “retail therapy”. I had so much stuff that I didn’t know where anything was. I decided that it was time to get rid of some of my clothes instead of buying new ones. This is how “Shop My Closet” idea was born. Today, it’s a fast growing Facebook Group consisting of over 1000 members. I hope that with your help, we can spread the word, so that one day we could reach 10,000 members. People have to change their attitude towards the use of clothing. Consumerism is wrong. If we care about our planet, our environment we have to start living by the principle of the “Three R’s: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.
Read more about Sustainable Clothing and Clothing Swapping here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_clothing
https://www.facebook.com/groups/ShopMyClosetGTA/
