Restyling is about getting more wears out of a piece and rethinking how a piece is being used. It’s a great way to practice your creativity while injecting a bit of your own magic. It’s a concept that you can apply to virtually every aspect in your everyday wanderings. Look around you and pick something you own? How often have you used it and how can you maximize is? How can you honour each thing that you own and enrich your own life with it?
With the recent Black Friday sales and upcoming holiday shopping in order, I had to find a way to resist giving into the plethora of promotions that were going on as well as the targetted ads that seemed to follow me on the internet sphere (side note – so many Structube ads all b/c I was browsing through the site ..even a printed catalogue showed up at my doorsteps! That’s some diligent marketing right there). I tried many approaches – rationalizing the purchase, creating a list of pros and cons (poor husband was the sole audience of my projected internal debate) as well as the good old “out of sight out of mind” tactic.
According the research, purchase decisions are made in a “split second without much rational thought” (State University of New York Buffalo). As soon as we make the decision to purchase, we feel a rush of positive emotion and the urge to repeat the same action in order to experience the “high” again (Decoding the New Consumer Mind). Scary right?! But apparently the best way to counter this irrational urge to consume is to be aware of what’s going on in our brain before we act upon it.
So I challenge you to reconsider the buying process. Was the sale item something you needed? Did you settle because it was a good price point and you just couldn’t spend any more time looking for the perfect dress? How often are you wearing this item? There’s no right or wrong answer, but these are questions worth investigating. It’s when we start becoming aware of what drives our actions can we then start to make a shift away from a mindless consumerism to a more humane and sustainable economy.
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