Progress
I am so pleased to report the great closet inventory of 2020 has begun! 18 items cataloged, only somewhere around 150+ or so to go....(I hope).
The process is a bit tedious, for sure, but also enjoyable in a way. Put some good music on, set up your little photo “studio”, and before you know it you’re spending some quality afternoon time with yourself. And you get bonus feel-goods because you’re making important progress toward a better version of yourself - a version with complete mastery of her personal closet and total control of her shopping habits (power pose!).
I decided to use an app to catalog my closet after briefly considering Pinterest for the job. Pinterest, after all, is how I’ve created my closet and packing capsules in the past. But having used it for those purposes, I knew it wasn’t up to the job I had in mind. What I needed was a tool for ultimate closet command à la Clueless. After a quick bit of app store browsing, I found what I was looking for: Stylebook. Why Stylebook? I’ll tell you:
It seems to have all the features I want and some I hadn’t even considered - multiple ways to import items, easy background removal, a variety of categorization tools, simple outfit creation, ability to make packing capsules and checklists, wear statistics, etc.
It cost me a whopping one-time $3.99. I rarely pay for apps (have I ever before this?), but this seemed like a low low price to pay for an app that will surely save me thousands of dollars over time by helping me to better exercise my existing closet and shop smarter going forward. The one-time payment was also wildly more palatable than the recurring monthly or annual payments that most of the competition wanted.
It has the best rating of all the closet apps I saw and it’s been around for a decade. I like that kind of staying power! When I’m investing in this project for long-term personal improvement, I want the app I’m using to be up for a long-term relationship too.
It has an excellent companion website (Stylebookapp.com) with helpful articles, FAQs, video tutorials, user stories, and a variety of other support tools.
The only major drawback I see for Stylebook so far is that it’s only available for iOS (iPhones and iPads). My personal tech is all from the Apple universe so this isn’t a problem for me, but I feel for folks who need to catalog their closet and can’t get in on this awesome app because they’re iOS-less.
It’s going to be at least a few weeks until I’ve completed my closet inventory, but I’m thrilled that I’ve gotten started and I can’t wait to finally live the final product (as final as a product that will continue to live and grow and change right along with me can be anyway). I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.
In the meantime, I like this progress thing. It feels GOOD!