Mar

26

my top 5 excuses for paying too much for clothes

Filed Under shopping | 26 Comments

window shoppingI often feel that as a personal finance blogger, I should be more frugal in my purchasing. Although I don’t throw money away exactly, I’m also not a follower of some of the most basic “being frugal” advice that there is. This is particularly true of clothes.

I usually pay full price for my clothes from regular high street shops.

A real frugal person would buy there clothes second-hand, or at massive discount in the sales. Whilst I don’t spend much money compared to many of my peers, compared to the rest of the personal finance crowd, I’m afraid I’d be considered a spend thrift. Here are my top 5 excuses.

excuse 1: a deprived childhood

When I was a kid, up until about the age of 16, apart from my (revolting brown, beige and gold) school uniform nearly all the clothes I had were hand me downs. When it was dress down day at school I was always very careful to be wearing the nicest of the clothes that I had.

Although I don’t resent this, I did always want new *shop-bought* clothes. I still do. I know that this isn’t really a deprived childhood, but this is one of my biggest excuses for not buying from second-hand clothes shops. I feel that I deserve better.

excuse 2: I’m a funny shape

People that have met me will confirm that I am not an average shape person. I’m 5 foot nothing, and a UK size 14 (US size 10?). This means that I am too short for regular women’s clothes. In fact, I’m actually too short for regular short people’s clothes (more commonly known as the petite section).

I am the perfect height for age 12 children’s clothes. Sadly (since kid’s clothes are cheaper) I’m far from the perfect build for that. In practice this means that it’s quite hard for me to find clothes that fit reasonably well - I’m usually in petite clothes that I’ve hemmed myself for work. When it’s hard to find clothes that fit, you are basically stuck buying them even if they aren’t that frugal.

excuse 3: I’m picky

I don’t wear brown. (See above mention of school uniform for reasons why.) I also don’t wear double breasted coats, or pencil skirts, or shirts. Basically, I’m a fussy dresser and I’m not willing to think too far outside the box. I know what suits me and I stick to it. This does mean that I don’t actually buy that many clothes, but on the other hand, it’s another reason why I end up paying full price for everything. When you’re picky, there’s less choice.

excuse 4: I don’t like busy shops

A great time to get the same clothing for less, is in the sales. Unfortunately, I hate shopping in the sales. I hate it being busy, everything takes twice as long, and the queues for the changing rooms are enormous. It gives me so little pleasure, that I’ve almost stopped going to the sales completely. When I do go, it’s generally at the tail end. It’s quieter, but not much is left.

excuse 5: I can afford to

I don’t need to pay tiny amounts for clothes. I have no kids and a reasonably well paying job. Unlike when I was a student - and it didn’t matter - I can actually afford to pay full price for clothes, as long as I don’t buy too much. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and with no necessity, and not a great deal of innate fashion sense, my frugal invention skills are under developed.

What do you think of my excuses? Should I try harder? Do you have any (justified or otherwise) excuses yourself for your own non-frugality? Let me know in the comments.

Image by mell242 

Mar

7

excellent customer service from plumbs direct

Filed Under shopping | 8 Comments

The lovely little house that I bought last year is Edwardian. I discovered after I moved in, that this means that it has high ceilings, and non-standard sized windows. Since I live in a pleasantly crowded inner city suburb, I shouldn’t really go without some kind of window dressing.

Now, in most of the rooms I can easily get away with an inexpensive roller blind or Venetian blind. The living room at the front has an L-shaped bay window, and as I mentioned non-standard sized (extra tall) windows. The only practical solution is custom made curtains.

To say that I’m not competent enough to make them myself would be somewhat of an understatement, so I turned to the modern homeowner’s trusty friend, the interwebs. Sadly the first few results that I got from google were not all that cheap. I decided to try out some of the top advertised results, and ended up at Plumbs Direct, whose prices were much more reasonable. I found some fabrics I though I might want (I’m fussy) and ordered some samples, the samples came, I picked out a nice fabric that I liked, measured and ordered the curtains.

Now, here’s the point at which it went wrong. For various reasons (I hadn’t changed my address at my bank) I should have had different billing and delivery addresses. Unfortunately I didn’t check the paperwork carefully, and the delivery address was wrong.

Not being the most organised person in the world, I didn’t notice for some time that the curtains hadn’t arrived. When I eventually realised that they should have turned up weeks earlier, I went through my emails and worked out what had happened. I contacted Plumbs to see if they could help me, and they told me that the curtains had been delivered (to the other address) and had then disappeared. They then offered to send me a replacement set of curtains at no additional cost.

Naturally I took them up on the offer, the curtains turned up, they are beautiful, excellent quality, well made custom curtains that fit my window perfectly. Did I mention that these curtains were about half the price of their competitors.

I love Plumbs Direct, and if you like the fabric choices, I suggest that you use them yourself.

PS I’d like to reassure you that I’m not being paid to write this. In fact, they’ve got no idea that I am. I just like the curtains, and great customer service.

Feb

26

designer furniture: knock offs vs. the real thing

Filed Under shopping | 12 Comments

What do you think of knock off modern classic furniture?

Happy ChairsI’m in love with modern design, especially modern furniture. My current most coveted purchase is a Louis Ghost Chair by Phillippe Starck for Kartell, which will go in my living room. Fortunately, the real thing costs about £135 ($270) which, for a modern design classic that I love, is pretty reasonable.

Some of my other furniture wants are a little less affordable in the official version. Take, for example, the Jacobsen Swan Chair designed for the SAS Radisson Copenhagen Hotel in the 1958. The licensed version is made by Fritz Hansen and costs about £1300 ($2600). However, in the UK you can get a knock off for about £300 to £400 ($600 to $800) from various online retailers.

There are quite a few people who get quite passionate about the undesirability of knock offs. Check out this post on Apartment Therapy, for example, where various people chime in about the (reasonably assumed) lack of quality on the knock off and that you should support the designer.

Part of me thinks that that I should think that buying a reproduction is a bit like condoning copyright theft. But I don’t. It’s not like people don’t buy reproduction Chippendale, and no one thinks that’s a problem. And, I’m never going to spend £1300 on an armchair, no matter how nice it is, even £350 is quite a lot of money, really.

Is it worse to market it blatantly as a knock off, or to make something very similar without acknowledging it’s origins?

Ikea make a stool. It’s called the Frosta stool, it retails for £8 in the UK. It bears a remarkable similarity to a birch stool by the Finnish designer Alvar Aalto, Stool 60. The designer version is better. It looks nicer, it’s made from solid wood, rather than veneer and particleboard.

But is the Aalto stool 15 times nicer? The genuine article sells for around £120 in the UK, a price point that could be affordable for me. But could you ever really justify it when the Ikea version is so much cheaper? And for those that say that Ikea furniture doesn’t last, if it only lasted 3-4 years, it would take between 45 and 60 years for the Aalto stool to work out more cost-effective. I know that the Aalto stool can last that long, but I’m not sure that I will, besides which I’ve had excellent Ikea furniture before now.

At the end of the day, I would like the satisfaction of knowing that I own the real thing, but I want reasonably priced beautiful furniture more. Paying more than a few hundred pounds for a single item (inflation adjusted in the future) is probably never going to feel like a good use of my money. What do you think?

Image by Larsz

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