How-To: Host a Clothing Swap
We had a Clothing Swap at Stormie’s house this weekend, and it was fun! Here’s how it works:
Invite a group of your friends to come to your house and bring all of their clothes, shoes, and accessories that they don’t want anymore (and that they would be getting rid of anyway). Sort and organize all of the items and then tell everyone to choose items to take home….for FREE. It’s a win-win for everyone involved because they get to clean out their closets, and also refresh it with new pieces.
Here are a few tips if you want to host your own:
Send out an invitation a couple weeks in advance. This could be an email, Facebook event, Evite, ect… Keep in mind the amount of space that you have, and how many women you can accomodate (we invited about 20 women).
Ask the invitees to give their items to you before the swap (depending on how many people, you may need up to a week to sort everything). That way, you can make everything super-duper organized and cute before your friends arrive!
Stormie let us use her house for the swap. We helped her get some of the bags sorted and folded and she did a great job of setting up, and organizing the rest.
You will need tables to put everything on. You really can’t have too much space for this. We organized items by category, and then size.
Make the items look attractive. This is the fun part- instead of just throwing everything in a pile, lay out and arrange them in a cute way. It’s fun to pair up bright colors and find unique ways to hang jewelry or hats.
In Stormie’s spare bedroom we set up 3 tables for shirts, pants and skirts. Shirts seem to be the highest quantity item when we do these, so they needed the most space. It was a lot of work to sort and fold all of these, but as you can see, it is much easier to go through and find what you want!
Oh! I almost forgot the most important part – food! We had our swap in the morning, and asked each of our friends to bring a small breakfast item to share. The food was delish, and gave us energy to do all of that hard shopping;)
After eating and drinking lots of coffee – it’s time to shop…
It was so fun to watch everyone go through the clothes and take lots of new stuff home. Nobody walked away empty-handed, and it was a fun morning to get together to chat, eat, and swap!
A few more thoughts on hosting a swap:
Everyone that wants to take part in the swap MUST donate items. It’s the same principle of “Take a penny, leave a penny”
We chose to do ours in the morning so that it wouldn’t cut into other activities. You could very easily do this in the afternoon or evening – whatever works best for your group.
Ask for help! Don’t try to take on the duty of sorting and organizing all by yourself. Ask a few friends to come over and help a few days before and it will save you a lot of time.
Don’t “pre-select” any clothing while sorting. This may be hard, but don’t allow yourself or your helpers to pick items out before the swap. Part of the fun is getting to experience the swap as a group, and if you’ve already taken everything you want, you’ll just be standing around with nothing to do while everyone else is having fun.
Give shopping bags out to carry loot home.
Have a designated “Dressing Room” available for trying on the clothes they aren’t sure of.
Donate the leftovers. You will definitely have items left at the end of the swap – bag them up and take them to the thrift store. It’s a great way to give back.
Thanks to all of our friend for coming to the swap! We hope that this will inspire you to have one!
