Living in Florida with a decent $108,000 salary, Brooklyn Karasack can generally afford to buy brand new clothes. But the 27-year-old has found a hobby she loves in making her own.
What started as a money-saving hack for Karasack has become a wonderful creative outlet. “I wasn’t getting enough out of just being able to be creative with the fashion I was buying,” she tells CNBC Make It.
“I started with making stuff for music festivals, and then it quickly snowballed into making just about everything that I wear.”
Karasack soon realized she could keep costs even lower by skipping the fabric store and buying secondhand items — existing articles of clothing, bags, shoes, curtains — and using those materials instead.
She’s a regular at a nearby Goodwill and the chain of Red, White and Blue thrift stores, and she frequents local secondhand shops. Sometimes she just makes minor alterations to some of her finds, and other times, she completely re-envisions how to use the material.
When she sews, Karasack doesn’t use patterns, she says, and is typically “winging it.” She uses her measurements to make silhouettes and adjusts as needed.
Whether it’s reimaging a dress you find at your local Goodwill or just wearing it off the rack, shopping secondhand is way to save money and shop more sustainably. “I think that it’s really fun to take the character that’s in something from the thrift store and turn it into something new,” Karasack says. “To take something that would probably go to a landfill and give it a new life.”
Here are Karasack’s best tips for a successful thrift store haul.
1. Go in with an open mind
Most thrift stores are a hodgepodge of people’s unwanted items. It’s overwhelming and it can be difficult to walk in looking for a particular item or style and walk out successful. Karasack encourages hopeful thrifters to go in “with an open mind.”
Though it may help to have a strong creative vision and some sewing skills, Karasack says her most impressive thrift flips happen “when I take something that wasn’t a shirt and turn it into a shirt.”
Karasack shows a pair of heels she thrifted then turned into a corset.
Brooklyn Karasack
The saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” often rings true when it comes to secondhand shopping. Karasack pushes things a step further by turning some items into completely new pieces.
“I’ve taken a pair of broken heels and made it into a corset. I’ve taken some purses that were stained and pretty gross on the inside and turned them into skirts,” she says. “I think that’s fun when it’s something you wouldn’t expect.”
2. Try things on in different ways
In a similar vein, Karasack is a huge proponent of styling items in unexpected ways. “Try a shirt on backwards, try it on upside down, and you can have a lot more fun and find new ways to wear things,” she says.
Karasack tries on her finds at the store, which some people may feel weird about. But “I think you really need to try things on to see all the possibilities with it” before buying, she says.
3. Shop with specific events in mind
Since you’ll spend less at a thrift store than you would at other retailers, it can be tempting to shop more frequently.
“It’s very easy to over-thrift,” Karasack says. She used to run into this problem by going thrifting without a specific event in mind. “Anything [with] a cool pattern I would buy, and the next thing I know, I have a thrift store in my closet,” she says.
It got to a point where Karasack wasn’t really saving money anymore because she was thrifting so often. Now, “I usually shop for things for specific events, so I’m never just shopping for the thrill of shopping,” she says.
Except for when she buys swimsuits, shoes and some accessories, Karasack has been able to rely pretty heavily on shopping secondhand for almost all of her clothing needs. “I haven’t shopped at a store other than a thrift store in about three years,” she says.
“I thrift just about everything and it definitely has helped me save a lot of money.”
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