I have been maintaining a spreadsheet to organize my clothing items, cost, number of wears, and other details about specific items, as well as a log of my outfits, for over a year now. I am always adjusting the system, but some of the main features have stabilized over the past few seasons and I wanted to start sharing my experience doing this with the world.
Buying New Clothes
Any new items I order get added to the spreadsheet when I receive them. I enter the brand, item name, color, material, price, date acquired, and some style information for organizational purposes (a general category like {“T-Shirt”, “Pants”, etc} and a more detailed style like {Crewneck, V-neck, etc}. I typically price gifted clothing at $0 or $1, I have also recently started noting if the clothes are new, responsibly made, secondhand, or self-made.
Logging What I Wear
I wrote a script for my Google Spreadsheet that automatically generates a Google Form with categories based on the general categories I mentioned above. Then, when I want to record what I wear, I go to the form, select the items I wore, and submit, where it gets automatically added to a sheet in my main Wardrobe Spreadsheet.
This sheet is linked to the wardrobe sheet, and whenever I update what I wore, a script updates the “wear count” for the item and the cost per wear. I tried out a feature where I collect the temperature for each day and add it to a list for each item, so I can see the general temperature range I’d wear an item during, but my implementation is pretty erratic and so the information isn’t super consistent.
Useful Insights
At a glance, I can easily sort my wardrobe to see the “Highest Price per Wear” or “Least Worn” items. I can see how many clothes I have from a given brand (hello, Outdoor Voices) or how many pairs of joggers I have. I can also track my spending on clothes over time, see how much of my money is going to fast fashion vs secondhand or responsibly made clothes, and how much I spend on shoes as opposed to t-shirts.
I’ve put together a very easy-for-me system of maintaining and minding my clothing habit. My biggest goal moving forward is to use this nice system I have to check in more on how much I’m spending, examine the value I’m getting out of my clothes, and learn more about how I buy and use my clothing.
One glaring gap in this system is any kind of visual logging – clothing and outfits are all visual, and for me it works to log items without any visual feedback, but it’s not always ideal. Figuring out how to support this without making the system too tedious to use is another todo.
I’d also like to make this kind of spreadsheet accessible to lots of people! If using something like this is something you’re interested in, let me know and I can loop you in when I start testing rolling this out to others!
