So for the better part of a year now, I have been noticing that more and more of my friends and colleagues were posting referral links to Stitch Fix. My favorite photographer was suddenly extremely more fashionable ("Have you been working out? What's different about you?") and another friend suddenly had monthly blog posts about Stitch Fix. What tipped me to trying Stitch Fix was when another friend upon wearing an outfit put together with items from her latest "Fix" said something to the effect of:
"Instead of being asked 'Rough night with the baby again?' I got all these compliments on how great I looked!"
Sold. Sold. Sold.
In another life I loved to buy clothes. But 2 pregnancies, 2 boys age 5 and under, and a new career where half that time I'm working with antique machinery have really changed my worldview on clothes. I'm now at a point where my weight has normalized from the two pregnancies, my clothes from 6 years ago aren't fashionable anymore, and wearing only cheapy clothing from Old Navy and Target is getting annoying. I tried to take my 2 year old son clothes shopping with me and all hell broke loose in the dressing room, which included him crawling out under the dressing door while I was mostly naked and into another occupied dressing room stall (true story).
So if for a mere $20 some Pretty Young Thing (P.Y.T....I mean, ahem..."stylist") could choose out clothes for me and send it to me with a free way to send back things that didn't work out and I could avoid that whole situation again, it was really worth a shot. The $20 styling fee is applied to any item that you choose to keep, so there is incentive to buy.
Now the one catch with Stitch Fix is that these are brands you would find at Nordstrom or Bloomingdales. Now if you're a bargain shopper (and I'm naturally a bargain shopper too), this is going to be a difficult one to swallow. But after trying on 15 pairs of pants and shorts one day and not finding one that fit, I realized I had wasted 2 hours looking for a bargain pair of jeans. On top of that, I'm of a very popular size range where by the time something goes on sale or hits the discount shops (Ross, Nordstrom Rack, TJ Maxx, Marshall's), usually everything in that size is just gone anyway.
So I decided, why not? In general I'm intrigued by the new business model of online personalization and also of subscription boxes in general. A return from an online shopping experience sometimes cost be about half the cost of the styling fee anyway, so I went ahead and signed up for my first "Fix" in May. And then I had to wait two months for my first shipment. Fun.
I'm going to review Stitch Fix here on this blog, with the caveat that I'm 1) no model and 2) not a fashion expert. Color expert, yes. Design expert, I would hope! Stationery genius, of course. But I know what I like and since my sister and my close friends are clothes horses I keep up. I am just a gal who is rediscovering my love for clothes and fashion.
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