Sell your pre-loved occasion wear with The Lady’s Maid.
Selling unwanted or unworn items in your wardrobe is a sustainable way of recycling your clothing whilst making room for clothes you actually wear. Photographing, listing, packaging and posting is time consuming so let The Lady’s Maid take care of the hassle for you!
How it works:
Submit a brief description and photo of your items to The Lady’s Maid via email: info@theladysmaid.com. Please note I will prioritise dresses, formal day wear, and occasion wear (so no casual pieces) and favour classic, timeless pieces from recognised brands. All items must be in excellent condition. Knitwear will be accepted only if it is in excellent condition and from a high end brand. Any accepted items will be valued and selling prices agreed. Once the items have been posted to me I will take care of photographing them on a mannequin, writing descriptions and listing them for sale via my pre-loved instagram page @theladysmaid_preloved and via this website. Once a piece sells I will dispatch it to its new home and you will receive payment for the piece minus my selling commission (your earnings: 65%, my commission: 35%). Once an item has been sent to me you agree to leave it with me for a minimum period of 6 months. After that if it hasn’t sold you can request for its return free of charge.
Laurence Coste rose quartz earrings: £125 ; Stuart Weitzman Leigh suede heels in desert rose (Size: UK 6) £150.
Why choose The Lady’s Maid?
My commission fee is lower than most other clothing re-sale platforms and consignment stores who typically deduct 50% in commission fees. I also have an international social media following who favour classic, timeless style, and trust my style choices so your pieces will be seen by the right buyers rather than being lost in the big eBay sea.
For all enquiries please email: info@theladysmaid.com
At least once a year I like to have a clear out to reorganise my wardrobe and get rid of things that I no longer wear. This January I had the biggest wardrobe detox ever and listed almost 200 items for re-sale. Initially I was motivated by raising extra funds to care for my poorly pug, Dorothy, who was diagnosed with a serious condition in October last year (protein losing enteropathy). Her vet bills escalated to £7,000 in 3 months. But the more I listed, the more I realised I wanted to let go of a lot of things in order to have a more streamlined wardrobe. So far I have raised £3,000 which will help fund Dorothy’s ongoing veterinary care. There are still lots of items left for sale, pictured and detailed below. Close-up photos of each piece are on my Instagram page @theladysmaid_preloved. Email: info@theladysmaid.com for more info or to purchase.
1. **SOLD** Kitri Studio – pink gingham dress
2. Laurence Coste – pink quartz earrings. £125.
3. Baukjen – blush pink cotton V neck jumper. £30.
4. Kezmay London. Pink tweed Alice band. £30.
5. **SOLD** Monsoon – Pink tie neck dress.
6. Mango – pink and green cotton midi dress. Size: Medium. £30.
This week (24-30 September) is Recycle Week so I’m encouraging people to help lower the amount of clothes that end up in landfill each year by recycling or donating their unwanted clothing. According to Wrap it is estimated that £140 million worth of clothes end up in landfill each year. Oxfam estimates that 9,513 garments are thrown into landfill every five minutes. These are really shocking statistics that can easily be reduced by recycling or donating your unwanted clothing.
Retailers and Recycling Initiatives
Marks & Spencer launched an initiative with Oxfam in 2012 called Schwopping to encourage people to recycle their unwanted clothes. You can bring along any unwanted clothes (not just those that are from M&S) and put them into one of their “Shwop Drop” bins in exchange for Sparks points. M&S then donate the clothes to Oxfam, who resell the garments online, in their stores or in international markets. Alternatively, you can go to an Oxfam store where you’ll receive a £5 M&S voucher if there’s an M&S item in your donation. Since the initiative was launched, 7.8 million garments have been “schwopped”, which is worth an estimated £5.5 million to the charity. If initiatives such as these are adopted by more retailers, it will significantly reduce the amount of clothes sent to landfill each year. See their website for more details and participating M&S stores.
Other stores that now run similar schemes include:
H&M (all brands of clothing in any condition welcome).
Zara (currently only available at selected stores). If you live in Spain they will also collect clothes from you if you have made an online purchase.
Donating to Charity
As well as regular high street charity shops, there are a few charities that specifically accept donations of work appropriate clothing which they then offer to unemployed people, to help them dress to impress at interviews. They also provide styling advice and interview tips which is a great way of helping people that may have been out of work for a long time.
Smart Works (Branches in London, Manchester, Reading, Birmingham, Newcastle and Edinburgh)
If you have designer clothing that you don’t wear anymore, there are many designer clothing resale sites where they can find a new home. Vestiare Collective based in France is the most popular one for use worldwide. There’s also Hardly Every Worn It and Cudoni based in London.
Recycling worn clothing
Damaged clothes and shoes that are beyond repair can be recycled along with other household textiles and made into new textiles, such as household insulation or mattress filling. Check with your local council to see if they collect clothing for recycling, or look out for clothing recycle banks in supermarket car parks. Refer to the website www.recycle.com to find out what you can recycle and where.
Love Not Landfill is a new campaign set up to encourage young people in London to dispose of old clothing responsibly. They have distributed textile banks across London where you can drop off unwanted clothes.
Image: Love Not Landfill
Remember: no textiles need to be thrown away – even your old bras, socks and pants can be recycled!
Hang on to your Christmas spirit a little longer and cleanse your closet instead.
If you are anything like The Lady’s Maid, the last thing you want to do in the midst of January is adopt the customary New Year post-Christmas detox, diet or that strange phenomenon of recent years: “dry January” (why make the bleakest month of the year any worse by depriving yourself of a warming tipple). As the first month of the year, it is natural that the arrival of January prompts people to assess their lifestyles and want to improve, in an effort to “start as you mean to go on”. Still, The Lady’s Maid prefers to bask in the glory of Christmas until at least Candlemas. So, instead of depriving yourself of food and drink’s winter-warming sustenance, The Lady’s Maid suggests you turn your attention to a “wardrobe detox” instead.
If you have had a January Sales splurge and need to free up space for your new winter additions, then January is a perfect time to de-clutter your closet and release your inner “Marie Kondo”. Most ladies, at one time or another, have uttered the panic-stricken words “I have nothing to wear”. It is never usually true and often a result of clothing clutter – it is hard to create an outfit if you can’t easily locate one. Clearing out clothing clutter will also help you to identify what gaps you may have in your wardrobe – garments that you may need to purchase to get the full potential out of the clothes you currently have, enabling you to create outfits with ease and take the stress out of dressing.
A YouGov survey in 2012 revealed that there are around 2.4 billion pieces of clothing lying unworn per year in the UK, cluttering up wardrobes across the land; this equates to approx 46% of the national wardrobe. A similar survey in 2017 by Weight Watchers estimated the figure of wasted expenditure on clothing to be £10 billion, or £200 per adult, with only 55% of the clothes women own actually being worn. Clothing clutter is clearly an ongoing problem. Whilst some people may be hanging on to things for posterity, or “just in case” they may need it/fit in to it one day, there is undoubtedly a hoarding of unworn or unnecessary clothing going on.
With this in mind, when you go through your wardrobe, be realistic about the clothes that you wear day to day; hanging on to garments that you no longer wear takes up space unnecessarily, so try to adopt a ruthless sorting process. Divide into the following groups:
Keep, wear regularly
Keep, but need to supplement with new purchases in order to wear
eBay/re-sell
Charity
Storage (out of season)
Discard/recycle
If garments no longer fit or you haven’t worn them in a while, try selling them on eBay first or donate to a charity shop. Popular designer and high-street labels and occasion outfits/dresses tend to sell better than casual clothes on eBay, so consider sending casual clothes straight to the charity shop, if they are in good condition, or to a clothing recycling bank. High-end designer labels will also sell well on designer second-hand clothing websites, such www.hardlyeverwornit.com or http://www.cudoni.com.
Keeping organised
To keep your clothing collection at a manageable level with a wardrobe that is accessible and wearable, try to resist purchasing any unnecessary items; focus instead on filling the gaps in your wardrobe that were revealed after the clear-out. Group 2 (things that you are keeping but need to supplement with new purchases in order to wear) is likely to be full of separates which only work if they have something to work with. Make a list of things you think your existing wardrobe would benefit from and focus on acquiring these items the next time you go clothes shopping. Your goal is for a versatile and manageable wardrobe to fit in with your space and lifestyle. Resist the temptation to purchase new one-off garments unless you think they will complement what you already own.
Once the detox is complete, your remaining wardrobe needs to be efficiently organised so that you can easily locate specific garments. It will be much easier to avoid clutter creeping back in if everything is suitable stored.
Here are The Lady’s Maid’s Top Tips for Organising your Wardrobe:
The best way to organise your clothing in your wardrobe is to divide it into sections, such as: work wear, casual wear, evening wear, sportswear. Within these sections organise garments by type (skirts/trousers/tops), and then by colour, darks to lights.
If you want your wardrobe to look neat and streamlined, discard shop hangers that came with your garments as these will vary in size and add bulk to the wardrobe space. If you adopt slim velour-covered plastic hangers, or slim rubber hangers throughout the rail you will keep the clothes hanging at an even level and achieve a streamlined visual effect as well as saving space.
Keep woollen knitwear folded to protect the natural fibres which will stretch if hung on a clothes hanger. Box-folding and arranging by colour is the best way of organising knitwear – keep different types together i.e. high-necks, V-necks, crew-necks etc for ease of location and then organise each type by colour, darks to lights. You can use a shirt-folding template to help achieve a uniform shape, or a plastic chopping board works just as well!
Hanging shoe organisers are a great space saver for flat footwear. These can be hung over a hanging rail to allow you to store multiple pairs of shoes. You can also store other small accessories here, such as scarfs, belts and gloves.
Out-of-season clothing can be stored on top of the wardrobe or under the bed, to free up space for clothing in wear during the current season. Be sure that any storage boxes and bags that you use are appropriate for clothing – they should be made of breathable cotton or canvas material, not plastic. And if woollen knitwear is present, add a lavender sachet to ward off the pesky moth. Delicate garments should be folded with acid-free tissue paper to protect them from creasing.
Drawer organisers are useful for keeping different types of underwear separate, and preventing you from having a top drawer full of jumbled smalls. If you don’t have drawers, then you could arrange underwear in open shoeboxes on shelves, or in similar shaped boxes.
Acrylic drawers and stackable trays are a good way of storing costume jewellery and sunglasses to protect them from dust; the transparent plastic makes it easy to view the contents.
This article also features on The Lady magazine website: www.lady.co.uk
The Lady’s Maid loves to shop for new clothes, but she is also very savvy when it comes to keeping her wardrobe organised so that there aren’t too many items collecting dust and going unworn and unloved. But what to do with these items? One place for which they are definitely not destined is the dustbin. Clothes should be bought to last and not thrown away, but even the most seasoned and stylish shopper will end up with items of clothing that are unwanted – perhaps rash purchases bought in the Sale or garments that no longer fit properly. Throwing away worn-out clothing should be avoided as it is environmentally damaging – millions of garments end up in landfill each year. According to Oxfam, 9,513 garments are thrown into landfill in Britain every five minutes. That’s a total of one billion items a year. As well as the environmental concern resulting from this (because some textiles will emit harmful gases when they eventually biodegrade), there is a huge financial cost to landfill depositing: at £72 per tonne of landfill waste, the cost per year of throwing away clothing in the UK is over £25 million.
Here are a few ways of dealing with your unwanted clothing without resorting to the dustbin:
Selling unwanted clothing on eBay is a great way to find your unwanted garments a new home, whilst – after all, one lady’s trash is another lady’s treasure!
Local Charity shops. Make sure that they are in a wearable condition and wash clothing before donating.
Worn-out clothing of appropriate fabric, such as cotton, can be cut into rags to use for household cleaning or shoe polishing.
Clothes and shoes can be recycled along with other household textiles and made into new textiles, such as household insulation or mattress filling. Some clothing will also be sold on for reuse to countries such as Africa. Check with your local council to see if they collect clothing for recycling, or look out for clothing recycle banks in supermarket car parks. Refer to the website www.recycle.com to find out what you can recycle and where.
Retailers and Recycling Initiatives
Marks & Spencer launched an initiative with Oxfam in 2012 called Schwopping to encourage people to recycle their unwanted clothes. Customers were invited to bring along an M&S labelled item of clothing that they no longer wore to a participating store where they would be rewarded with a £5 M&S voucher in return. M&S then donated the clothes to Oxfam, who resell the garments online, in their stores or in international markets. Clothing that cannot be resold can be used to make new fabric for things like loft insulation. Since the initiative was launched, 7.8 million garments have been “schwopped”, which is worth an estimated £5.5 million to the charity. If initiatives such as these are adopted by more retailers, it will significantly reduce the amount of clothes sent to landfill each year. See their website for more details and participating M&S stores.
Jigsaw launched an advertising campaign in 2015 to encourage the idea of clothing being for Life and not for Landfill. Their ads featured clothes from their current collection worn with vintage pieces to promote the idea that fashion doesn’t have to be all about the new and that quality clothing can be classic and bought to last for decades, with the new complementing the old and vice versa.
So before discarding even that worn-out old bra to the dustbin, have a think about the lasting damage to the environment to which you are contributing, and recycle!
The Lady’s Maid loves to shop for new clothes, but she is also very savvy when it comes to keeping her wardrobe organised so that there aren’t too many items collecting dust and going unworn and unloved. But what to do with these items? One place for which they are definitely not destined is the dustbin. Clothes should be bought to last and not thrown away, but even the most seasoned and stylish shopper will end up with items of clothing that are unwanted – perhaps rash purchases bought in the Sale or garments that no longer fit properly. Throwing away worn-out clothing should be avoided as it is environmentally damaging – millions of garments end up in landfill each year. According to Oxfam, 9,513 garments are thrown into landfill in Britain every five minutes. That’s a total of one billion items a year. As well as the environmental concern resulting from this (because some textiles will emit harmful gases when they eventually biodegrade), there is a huge financial cost to landfill depositing: at £72 per tonne of landfill waste, the cost per year of throwing away clothing in the UK is over £25 million.
The Lady's Maid 
