Are you a conscious consumer?
For my first blog, I wondered how much of a conscious consumer you are when buying furniture, homeware and clothes?
Have you gone the hole hog and only buy second hand or ethically sourced new pieces or are just starting out very gradually, or is it an area where that you haven’t given much thought to?
It has, for a long time, been the running joke in my family that if I bought something it was most likely to have come from a charity shop or car boot. From about the age of 13, when I bought my first second hand pair of DM’s and an old rain mac from the charity shop, I’ve been hooked. I must admit I did go through a phase in my late 20’s though where I seemed to frequent the high street shops far too much but then I soon switched back to picking up my clothes secondhand wherever possible.
There are a lot of people (including some of my family members!) that can’t see the appeal in searching through bundles of other people’s clothes, let alone wearing them. But to me, I absolutely love what it stands for. It’s not just unearthing that cool vintage shirt, its the fact that I found it amongst all those other clothes, and that it fits me perfectly (as there aren’t any other sizes you can ask for!), and that it’s going to be cheap to buy. But to top it all off, I’m going to give it a new lease of life and its not going to landfill where it would produce harmful, toxic gases when it decomposes, and I’m not having to buy a shirt thats been made from scratch using up more resources than is necessary. It’s amazing that one conscious choice has so many positives to it.
And so what followed my obsession with buying second hand clothes was probably a natural progression, that crept up without me really being aware, and I started to buy vintage furniture and homeware. Just gradually, if I needed something for the home, I looked in those same places - charity shops, car boots, antique fairs, and from that I created a predominately secondhand home. Which again, for those who visit, wouldn’t necessarily know that it was this way.
So how much of a conscious consumer are you? I’d love to hear!⠀