A Clothing Swap Party: A FUN and eco-friendly way to clean out and spice up your closet

I am literally MONTHS behind in sharing this post with you guys. It was one of those things where I was going to do it awhile ago and just never got around to it… but here we are!

Back earlier in the fall, my friends and I got together and we held a clothing swap party! We had SUCH a great time, walked away with “refreshed” closets and also helped to make a small difference in our community!

(I had forgotten my “real” camera that night, so please forgive the iPhone photos… best I could do! 🙂)

What exactly IS a clothing swap party?

A clothing swap party is where you clean out your closet of all the items that you no longer wear, no longer fit, or just want to get rid of. Tops, pants, dresses, shoes, accessories, etc… anything that you want out of your closet. Your friends then do the same thing.

Then, you pick a location (we hosted ours at one of our friend’s houses) and you bring all your stuff there, lay it out, and everyone walks around and “shops” from all the stuff people have brought and you take home what you want!

Here are the “rules” we had laid out at the party:

We had a TON of delicious snacks and beverages, we played music, and it ended up being just a fun and laid back girl’s night with some free shopping! We had soooooo much stuff. Everyone really cleaned out their closets for this!

How exactly does the clothing swap party work? What makes it most successful?

We were really flexible with it… we originally had the intention of only taking home the same number of items we brought, but we quickly threw that out the window. No one really cared if you only brought four items but took home ten or if you brought 20 items and only took home three. …if that makes sense.

We separated things out by category and size. We had a table / area for shoes, an area for accessories, we had tables organized by numbered sizes, maternity, etc. 

Having a clothing swap party is a great alternative to shopping (hello FREE!!), makes a positive impact by not contributing to “fast fashion,” and also helps to reduce textile waste. 

Did you know that the average American generates about 82 pounds of textile waste each year? That adds up to about 11 MILLION tons of textile waste from the United States ALONE… EACH YEAR. And a lot of it just ends up in landfills our other places causing a huge negative impact on third world countries and our environment. (source and source)

So, once everyone decided on the things they wanted to take home, people were either allowed to take home the things they brought that no one wanted, or it could be left for us to donate.

However, we were VERY intentional about who we donated items to. I HIGHLY recommend researching local organizations and see the kinds of donations they take and what they do with them.

We donated all the shoes and outerwear to a local organization that works DIRECTLY with the homeless in our community… so we knew that EVERYTHING would be put to good use. We took the rest of the items to another local organization called Durham Rescue Mission that also doesn’t discard any donations.

A lot of “major” non-profit organizations will actually discard donations or just ship them off to third world countries and they turn into textile waste, basically.

We just had a BLAST and we are definitely going to be doing this regularly! We are thinking maybe twice a year… once in the fall and one in the spring! A great way to get a closet refresh.

My friend Lindsay is going to kill me for sharing this… bahahahaha but we thought it would be fun to play a little dress-up with some of the clothing! This picture makes me laugh so hard. 🙂 🙂 🙂 

So what do you think? Have you ever done a clothing or closet swap party with your friends? Do you think this is something you’ll try? I hope you do! If you have, share your experiences in the comments!