I'm a fan of thrifting & offering contemporary clothing along with gorgeous vintage! You may have noticed I call Flopsy Life a preloved clothing store, not vintage. While over half of what I offer in The Shop is vintage (more than 20 years old), a good portion is modern pieces. A few are from sustainable & higher-end brands, like Eileen Fisher or Isabel Marant, many are from smaller labels I don’t know, & some are fast fashion pieces.

There are a million decisions to be made when running a business, and I thought I'd share some of my thought processes behind choosing what to carry, along with a few other weird things I do, like removing tags & not listing sizes.

Nature vs. Nurture

I don’t love fast fashion, but my issue with it isn’t the clothing but the companies that make them. I'm concerned about how they produce the clothing, particularly how they care for their workers & their impact on the environment. But the garments themselves are usually pretty great! Yes, there can be some pieces that feel awful & will either fall apart in three wears or outlive us all, but the same is true of vintage. There are some absolute treasures to be found, well-made silk, linen & cotton garments that will last for many years.

Buying these pieces secondhand does not support the company, & I remove all labels from clothing (unless it's a brand I love or a unique vintage tag) so that the garment is no longer associated with them. It's like shopping secondhand offers the piece a new life with a blank slate!

I Love Mother Earth

The hardest part of thrifting for most folks is how freaking overwhelming it can be because of how much stuff there is. Half the time I drive up to Value Village, there’s a shipping container full of even more stuff, on top of a store overflowing with inventory, a stuffed back room, and the people dropping even more stuff off.

It haunts me.

Anytime I find a pretty piece, I’m stoked because it makes space for something else to find a new home. So the more things I find new homes for, the more other things can continue their journey! Plus, it’s keeping it out of the landfill or from being shipped to other countries. On top of that, the more people shop secondhand, handmade, or sustainable, the less waste is (hopefully, ideally, maybe in theory?) produced through making new fast fashion clothing as demand goes down, or they adopt more sustainable practices. That’s pretty damn cool to me!

A Perfect Fit

Because there are fewer high-quality, plus-sized options, size inclusivity can be hard to achieve when shops focus solely on vintage. I started Flopsy Life because I couldn't find anything that fit me, aligned with my values, & was within my budget - that's still the core of why I do this years later. We all deserve to have clothing we're confident in that makes us smile & feel our best.

I try to have a selection of both romantic, frilly pieces along with minimalist ones in as many sizes as I can find, & I shop in both the "men's" & "women's" sections (which is also why I list measurements instead of sizes). Offering this range would not be possible if I didn't include modern pieces.

The beauty of a preloved garment is what’s important to me, not when & where it was made.