http://www.clotheshorsepodcast.com/

Clotheshorse, PO Box 193, Bird in Hand, PA (2025)

09/04/2025

I’m terrible at lots of things: most sports, memorizing music and poems, remembering people’s names, and ironing are just a few things on a long list.

But one of my superpowers is thrifting/shopping secondhand. I’ve been doing it pretty much my entire life, starting with yard sales with my grandma as a kid, followed by flea markets and auctions (also with my grandma), and eventually thrift stores as a teenager. So I have a lot of advice for anyone who is new to thrift shopping. TBH if Clotheshorse ever actually becomes a real paying job for me (and I can stop working at my other job), I would love to take van loads of people secondhand shopping. I’ll just keep dreaming for now!

In honor of Secondhand September, here are some tips from me...I mean, baby animals. lol

I know we have tons of pro thrifters in this community, so leave your tips in the comments BUT with one rule: you have to tell us what baby animal you would be.

I’m opting for baby raccoon: I’m cute, I have good eye makeup, and I love digging through other people’s garbage.

P.S. has a whole ebook about thrifting!

09/03/2025

YAY FOR SECONDHAND SEPTEMBER!!!

The most sustainable thing any of us can do? Use things that already exist!

The Secondhand First way of life is more than just shopping secondhand: It’s mending. It’s stain removal. It’s laundering clothes carefully. It’s swapping, sharing and mindfully rehoming. We need as many people as possible doing this if we want to mitigate the damage of fast fashion and overconsumption.

WE CAN DO IT!!!

09/02/2025

IT’S SECONDHAND SEPTEMBER!!!

On average, Americans buy about 70 new articles of clothing each year.

If you’re shocked by that or you haven’t bought new clothes in years...remember that this is an average. That means if you bought no new clothes this year, someone else bought 140 garments. Over the past 15 years, the amount of clothing produced each year has doubled, while the amount of time we actually wear a new item has dropped by 40%. Most garments are only worn about 7 times!!! 😖

And the thing is....it’s a lot easier to buy 70 new items of clothing in a year than you might think, thanks to online shopping, free shipping thresholds (“free shipping over $50,” etc), and super duper cheap ultra fast fashion like SHEIN and Temu.

There is already too much clothing on this planet. And no, we aren’t running out of secondhand clothing (so please stop telling people that they shouldn’t thrift). All of us must make a shift into a more ethical and sustainable wardrobe.

While plenty of brands and retailers are happy to offer us brand new “sustainable” collections, the reality is the most sustainable and ethical clothing is...clothing that already exists! Some experts believe that we need to buy 75% less brand new clothing. And it’s a lot easier than you think!

A sustainable wardrobe isn’t JUST shopping secondhand (although that’s a part of it), it’s also rewearing the things you already own, extending the life of your clothing via repair and care, and sharing/swapping/rehoming things you no longer wear.

As we REDUCE REFUSE RESIST, it’s a great time to reevaluate the clothes we already have and get comfortable with buying a lot less new clothes. It’s a great time to learn new habits! So let’s do this!!!

09/01/2025

HAPPY LABOR DAY!

Just a reminder that the working class (aka you and me) has more power than we might think because the world stops running without us.

I’m working today (because there is no PTO when you work for yourself), but I hope all of you who aren’t working today are out there protesting and/or doing something nice for yourself!

If you ARE working today, I hope you’re getting time and a half.

08/28/2025

Something about this week has just been extra difficult, in a year+ that has already felt overwhelming and exhausting. Definitely cried a lot more this week and had more difficulty concentrating. It’s just more bad news after even more bad news. I have also been struggling with this feeling of being a loser who’s just bad at this Clotheshorse thing (and I’m the state of the world is compounding that sense of loserness).

If you’re feeling like giving up right now (which is a feeling I super understand today)...I want to remind you that nothing in this world will get better without work from all of us...and we have the power to create lasting, significant change.

I wake up some days and I feel like, what am I even doing? How could I possibly be doing anything good for this world? Why am I even bothering?

And then I remember that it’s not just me. It’s every person I talk to and every person who hears me talk about this, and every person who talks to the other people about what they heard me talk about...all of us connect with one another...and then we actually work together and make change. And it really does start with us as Individuals. I believe in us, and I believe in the enormous potential of what we can do together.

08/27/2025

MORE ADVICE FROM CATS!!

in the most recent episode, I talked about how cause marketing works because it tricks us into believing that we can shop our way to a better world...and it’s just not true.

Slow fashion really isn’t about WHAT you buy, it’s about what you DON’T buy. It’s a way of life that de-centers shopping and focuses on buying less, finding creative solutions, and building community. Finding slow fashion changed my life in so many radical, positive ways. I want this for everyone!

We can’t shop our way to a better world. But we can build community. We can create. We can support and nurture. We can change and grow. I wouldn’t spend all of my time doing this work if I didn’t believe that. And you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t believe it (at least a little bit), too. Let’s get more people to believe this with us!

What made you decide you wanted to learn more about slow fashion and get involved? Tell us in the comments!

08/26/2025

The most sustainable thing any of us can do is...BUY LESS NEW STUFF. And while that sounds simple, I know that it is much more difficult than it sounds, right? As we have been dissecting in this summer’s podcast episodes about brand and branding...most of our shopping is wrapped up our emotions.

Breaking the habit is going to be hard work for just about everyone reading this post. And it doesn’t help that that the retail machine keeps rolling on, coming up with new ways to get you to spend money and give them a little bit more of your paycheck every week:

★ Expanding into categories like cosmetics, home goods, intimates, and activewear. A few years into the fast fashion era, brands realized there were only so many clothes, accessories, and shoes they could sell you, so they needed to add some new things to sell you if they were ever going to be able to maintain that sales growth year after year.

★ Reminding you that you needed a new outfit for every wedding, party, birthday, vacation, and event.

★ Going hard on holiday stuff: from Halloween underwear to Christmas socks to 4th of July swimsuits, brands are constantly creating new reasons to shop.

Our brains are hardwired to want rewards. Shopping is the easy way to satisfy your brain, but there are other things you can do that have nothing to do with buying stuff. And they may have a more positive impact on your day-to-day life and your own well-being!

I think sometimes we are super hard on ourselves when we break our commitment to skip impulse shopping. And then we feel guilty, embarrassed, angry at ourselves. You know what I’m talking about here. It turns into a cycle of shame, not unlike diet culture. One thing I have learned personally is that bad feelings just lead to more shopping and then, even more bad feelings. Be gentle on yourself. It’s progress, not perfection. And by thinking about these things and working to make changes in your habits, you deserve a pat on the back for starting the work.

I’m one person who is limited to sharing info into a few rectangles, so I’m definitely missing a lot of ideas for things to do instead of shopping. Share your ideas in the comments!

08/25/2025

Late last week, I released a new episode of the podcast, part three in an ongoing series about brands and how they influence our identities and drive consumerism. In this episode, I unpacked something that I have wayyyyyy to much professional experience with....cause marketing. Aka, when companies use charitable giving and social issues as a marketing story. This is something important for the slow fashion community to understand because it’s just another way that brands get us to buy stuff we don’t need.

This episode (another 20 page single spaced script) covers a lot of territory:

✅ The flaws in the “buy one, give one” model, with a special deep dive into TOMS
✅ How brands engineer fundraiser collections to be profitable (I did this nonstop at my worst job ever)
✅ The effectiveness of “round up” at checkout campaigns (well at least they are effective at making us feel awkward,
✅ Why B Corp certification doesn’t mean as much as it once did (and why Nespresso kinda ruined it)
✅ The real reason companies do fundraisers for charity and causes (SPOILER: it’s cheap and it works)
✅ And we will do the math to get to what a 1% giveback really means.

This post captures only a tiny portion of the content of the actual episode, so go give it a listen!!!

Working on this episode answered a lot of questions I have...but it also triggered way too many miserable memories of negotiating feminist tee orders on the way to my own wedding and the time my employer decided to do a fundraiser based on Melania Trump’s Zara jacket.

P.S. Thanks to for sponsoring this episode!

08/24/2025

My life is full of anecdotes that involve men telling me that there was no way I could be smart AND like cute things. Like, a guy told me “There’s no way you read any of the books in your living room if you also have a Hello Kitty alarm clock.” REALLY DUDE?! Don’t challenge me to a literary criticism competition because I will defeat you!!!

But the fact is, many of us also internalize that line of thinking, regardless of our gender. Some of us naturally prefer a more tone-downed, minimalist aesthetic. But others (myself included) have felt that in order to be taken seriously, we have to express ourselves via neutral color palettes and a lot less ruffles and bows.

Reclaiming pink and cuteness is a pretty radical act in a society that pushes navy and neutrals as the “respectable” alternative. In a culture that considers anything “feminine” to be lesser. And years ago, one of the main reasons the Clotheshorse blog fell apart is because the team working on it felt that it should move into a more neutral aesthetic. That felt like a step backward for me and for all of the people who had found themselves being seen by what I was doing with Clotheshorse.

So I’m just going to keep posting cute stuff that is also thoughtful and researched. That’s what Clotheshorse is...community, compassion, care, and...cuteness.

08/21/2025

New episode coming in a few hours. It took TEN HOURS to upload the raw files for Dustin—who is out on tour—so thank you for being patient!
This week’s episode is about cause marketing...and the ultimate conclusion? Companies could do better and make real impact on the planet and people IF they really wanted to invest in the work to do things differently. Of course, most aren’t doing that, and instead they are using shortcuts like greenwashing and cause marketing instead.

That made me think of the issue of merch and Clotheshorse. Clotheshorse is a massive financial failure, brought to you by my ability to work full time as a business advisor and instructor. One of the reasons? I just don’t want to do things that feel not in line with my values, like taking ads from online casinos or doing affiliate marketing here on social media.

Y’all have been asking for merch for years, but I felt super weird about it. It’s an issue I have turned over and over in my mind. You know how I feel about merch and promo tees. And I didn’t want to be making more stuff for the landfill.

After SO much research, testing, feedback and votes from you, last summer I found a merch situation that feels okay for me: iron-on transfers and stickers. My hope is that you will use the transfers on thrifted shirts or other tote bags, shirts, textiles that you already have lying around. You can easily iron them on with a home iron (you will receive instructions with your order). They can also cover existing screenprints. I’ve been loving seeing what you have created with these transfers over the last (almost) year. Let’s get even more life out of something that already exists!

At the Clotheshorse jamboree, we heat pressed these to garments/items attendees brought with them. And we also had a rack of thrifted tees for those who forget to bring something. Yes, I actually bought a secondhand heat press on FB Marketplace. It gave Dustin a chance to live his fantasy of working in a t-shirt shop on the boardwalk. We will be doing this again at the live shows in Portland and Seattle this fall...along with offering some new designs and (hopefully) some Clotheshorse zines.

08/20/2025

⬆️⬆️⬆️ this is from this week’s episode of the podcast, part three in a series all about branding and how emotional branding fuels consumerism. It might be *out* tonight but more likely tomorrow because transferring epic audio files back and forth while my husband/audio engineer is on tour is slow and annoying.

But this week’s episode is all about “cause marketing,” covering a range of topics including round ups at checkout, fundraiser collections, feminist tees, B Corp certification, 1% For The Planet...and so much more!

Anyway, what would YOU add to the list above? What does the slow fashion community know that you wish everyone else knew?

08/19/2025

By now you know I’m a highly sensitive, very cute horse-they. And one thing that always makes me super depressed? When I see someone being preachy, judge-y, and sanctimonious on social media about fast fashion and people’s shopping habits...and they drop Clotheshorse as the source of the information they are screaming into the void.

When that happens, it reminds me that I am not doing a good job of modeling how these conversations should be happening. It forces me to do better...and when I saw someone acting this way on another social media platform earlier this week, I realized that it’s been a while since I talked about HOW to have effective conversations about fast fashion and slow fashion. SO LET’S TALK ABOUT IT!!

Why is this so important to me? Well, we need everyone involved in dismantling fast fashion if we’re ever going to make a difference. And that means have good conversations about it with everyone we know!

When we don’t talk about it? Things get worse!
☹ Brands continue to sell us low quality, poorly fitting items that don’t last very long.
☹ Brands get away with stealing art and designs from small brands and makers.
☹ Companies continue to underpay and overwork everyone involved in developing, making, selling, and shipping the things we buy.
☹ The industry continues to waste water and natural resources, while churning out billions of garments every year that no one will ever buy.
☹ The Global South continues to deal with the repercussions of all of the low quality stuff that we barely wore or used.

But here’s the magic of talking about it:
When you talk to the people in your life about slow fashion, they start talking to other people they know.
And those people talk to the people they know. And it spreads and spreads.
When a lot of people are talking about it, major change starts to happen, via both governmental policy and the rise of new social trends involving a shift in our consumption habits.

If you want to learn more about this...I did a whole episode about it. So go check out episode 198.

Clotheshorse

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