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Inexpensive Children’s Clothing: Not Exactly Eco-Friendly

Posted by Loobalee in Reviews

Apr|22|2008

Inexpensive children’s clothing is generally NOT eco-friendly. In fact, it can be very ecologically and economically unfriendly.

While it can be like shopping in a candy store and easy on the pocketbook to purchase multitudes of inexpensive children’s clothing items in the big box and low-end department stores, it can also be very wasteful.

Sure, it’s fun to have “new” things. But, the quality of the item is often suspect, not to mention rarely eco-friendly. And, the clothing typically doesn’t wash and wear well nor maintains a resale value. So, two big lessons here:

1) Not Ecologically Friendly

Inexpensive can often also often mean mass-marketed and mass-manufactured without eco-friendly materials and not using eco-friendly manufacturing processes.

I love the new site, Evo.com. Evo rates products from about 400 retailers (and growing) based on a detailed set of eco-friendly criteria. Each product gets a 1 - 5 leaf rating (5 being the best). When you click-thru to purchase a product, you know exactly how eco-friendly you are being with your decision. Evo.com is the first service I’ve seen to make being eco-conscious simple to understand and simple to do.

Unfortunately, you won’t find the $2.99 - $9.99 clothing items for children on the site, and may never will. I’d love Evo to actually try to rate this segment of the apparel market. Although it looks like an item needs at least a one-leaf rating to be represented on the site.

2) Not Economically Friendly

Believe it or not! Buying that $12.99 dress can actually be worse on the pocketbook than the $34.50 dress, or that $89.00 dress! Watch for the quality (and more eco-friendly), designer brands of clothing to go on sale for 25-50% off, wear them, and then re-sell them for 25-60% of the retail price.

Or, take the highly desirable dress for $89.00. Let’s say I purchased it for $44.99. It’s a fancy dress, so my child only wore it a couple of times and it’s still “like new”. I resell if for $45.00 at the beginning of the next season — and, my child wore it for free! Or, maybe I resold it for just $32.00 — and my child wore it for about $12.99.

Suddenly, the $12.99 dress doesn’t look like such a good deal afterall!

At best, the $12.99 dress was approximately a ‘wash’ with the higher value dresses. Maybe it was even purchased on sale for $7.99. But, these items don’t hold their resale value well. Your best luck will be in a garage sale at about 10-20 cents on the dollar, or at a resale shop (who keep 40, 50, or 60%).

Our “Dress for Free” philosophy

Sure, it may be tempting and easy to pick up a few cheap clothing items for your kids while you’re doing your grocery shopping and running you errands, but turn on your eco-conscious meter before you buy.

The examples explored above are essential to our “Dress for Free” philosophy at Loobalee. We want you to be able to dress your children in fabulous, eco-friendly clothing — for practically Free! Buy and sell on Loobalee, and we’ll show you how.

Loobalee - coming soon!

– Suzanne Rielle, Co-Founder, Loobalee.com