When it comes to clothes, I live at the “low cost/low time/low quality” end of the pareto frontier. But the bay area had a sudden attack of weather this December, and the cheap sweaters on Amazon get that way by being made of single-ply toilet paper. It became clear I would need to spend actual money to stay warm, but spending money would not be sufficient without knowledge. 

I used to trade money for time by buying at thrift stores. Unfortunately the efficient market has come for clothing, in the form of resellers who stalk Goodwill and remove everything priced below the pareto frontier to resell online, where you can’t try them on before buying. Goodwill has also gotten better about assessing their prices, and will no longer treat new cashmere and ratty fleece as the same category. 

But the market has only become efficient in the sense of removing easy bargains. It is still trivial to pay a lot of money for shitty clothes. So I turned to reddit and shoggoths, to learn about clothing quality and where the bargains are. This is what I learned. It’s from the POV of a woman buying sweaters and coats, but I expect a lot of the information to be generally applicable.

General money saving tricks

When shopping online, put an item in your cart, checkout enough to give them your email address, but don’t confirm the purchase. You will almost always get a reminder email with a discount. If this doesn’t work the shop is either very high end, or Amazon. It sometimes works with individual sellers on platforms like ebay and etsy. .  You can use the wait as a cooling off period where you decide if you really want something.

Most sales are fake. Real sales happen at the end of the season, when whatever you buy won’t be useful for another 9 months, if you have the misfortune to live somewhere with weather. Saving money through sales is like persistence hunting, which I find boring and stressful so I didn’t look into this much. But if you prefer it to thriting, I’m sure reddit will explain how to optimize. 

Every store will offer you a coupon the second you load the site. They don’t want much, just your email address. I ignore this, and then if I decide to buy something I revisit the site in incognito mode to get the discount

Discounters

I briefly thought that even if proper thrift stores no longer worked, discounters like Marshall’s did. Officially these work by buying overstock from proper stores and reselling it at markdown, so if you don’t care about being behind trend it’s a big leap forward in the cost-quality trade off. Unfortunately, this is mostly a lie.  Marshalls and TJ Maxx primarily sell items that were produced with the intention to be sold at their store, either under some brand they made up or licensing a luxury brand while not replicating the brand’s quality (legal bootlegs). Ross Dress for Less does this less but still a lot.

You can spot this at Marshall’s by looking at the ID number on the tag- ending in 1 means it was produced for Marshall’s, 2 means genuine overstock. You can also use the RN number on the sewn-in tag to check the manufacturer. My expensive-by-my-standards winter coat had every appearance of being genuine overstock, down to a tag from another store listing a price 3 times Marshall’s price, but turned out to be bootleg. 

Every discounter lists a “comparison price” next to their price on their tag. It is completely made up, which is why it’s surprising that they often assign themselves a discount of < 50%. You could tell any lie you wanted, Marshall’s. Why are you holding yourself back?

Online Thrift

This is where all the good items you used to find at goodwill went- ebay, poshmark, thredup. ThredUp was amazing when it was in the “VC free money” stage, but their return policy tightened up and it’s now merely okay. Poshmark is aimed at designer goods. Ebay is like you remember, except Buy It Now is dominant and actual auctions are rare. 

In addition to being more expensive than old school Goodwill, online shopping means you’re dependent on a few photos, often poorly lit, and you can no longer try items on for free. So this works best if it’s a forgiving item or you know a brand’s fit works for you. Heavy coats are almost the ideal objects to shop online- forgiving of fit, very expensive new but low resale. 

Thrifting is fun for me in a way that timing sales isn’t. Whether it’s worth the time for you depends on how fun it is and your time/money exchange rate. Many sellers do allow returns for a fee, but I haven’t tested the tolerances for it (I’ve tested Amazon’s returns pretty thoroughly and their tolerance is infinite).

In addition to “save an item and wait”, resale platforms often offer the ability to proactively offer a lower price. My success rate in asking for severe discounts is maybe 10%, but it was the first time I tried so it feels higher.

Quality

I started with two methods for assessing brand quality: ask reddit and ask claude (who is mostly asking reddit). At any amount of money I could conceivably be willing to spend, there is always someone going “that stitching is so low quality it will murder your puppy”. Luckily there are many redditors who have the concept of a pareto frontier.

If you can touch the garment, you can check the quality yourself. People are surprisingly good at this intuitively, but a few things to look for are:

• Fabric type. the better the fabric, the more likely they did other things right. Make sure you’re reading the fabric tag- I’ve seen items with 3% cashmere content advertised as cashmere
  • In general natural fibers are considered better and more expensive. My impression is that synthetic fabrics are actually pretty good now, but natural fibers are still associated with higher quality in areas like stitching and design. 
• Fabric thickness- higher is better
• Loose threads
• Is there puckering around the seams?
• Is the stitching straight?

I only checked a handful of youtube reviewers, but my favorite is Jennifer Wang, who seemed properly autistic about clothing quality and understanding that there are multiple places on the pareto frontier one might choose to occupy (or alternately, has been bought off by Uniqlo, who she praises a lot as good-for-the-cost). She has this overview video, but consider watching a few brand comparisons to see it in action.

Brands

There are a lot of brands reddit thinks used to be good but have gone downhill (without corresponding drops in price). I expect this is a mix of  genuine change from companies spending down brand capital and survivorship bias on older sweaters. GAP is the rare brand that people consider to be improving right now.

Brands that were frequently listed as on the pareto frontier for sweaters: Quince, Uniqlo, Naadam, Eileen Fisher, Johnstons of Elgin, William Lockie, J. Crew, Patagonia, Neiman Marcus, Lands End, Nordstroms, Everlane

Wool facts

Wool is annoying to wash. This is fine for an item of clothing I always wear over something else and by definition don’t need if I’m sweating, but I really side-eye cashmere t-shirts.

Wool’s advantage over fleece is that it is breathable, and thus is comfortable over a wider range of temperatures. If you are moving you want wool, because it allows heat to dissipate. Meanwhile my fleece leggings feel unbearably clammy after a mild walk. However if you’re not moving, wool will leak body heat faster than fleece at the same weight

Cashmere is considered the cadillac of wools because it is the softest wool available en masse, but also because it traps more heat per unit weight than other wool. If a nice heavy sweater is a feature for you, consider superfine merino wool, which is cheaper, almost as soft, and has some chance of being machine washable. While I can’t prove this I suspect you’re also less likely to be ripped off by fake or low quality merino, since if you’re going to lie it might as well be a more expensive wool. 

Other tips 

You can 80/20 ironing by hanging the item on a hanger in the bathroom while you shower.

If you’re buying natural fibers and especially wool used, put it in the freezer for three weeks and run it through the dryer (while already dry, you’ll ruin the fabric if it’s wet) to kill moth eggs.

If you’re not a coward, “hand wash only” can mean “inside out in a lingerie bag on delicate”. However the bit about using special detergent for animal-based fabrics is real: Regular detergent has enzymes that break down wool and silk.

Cable knit is very warm as long as there is absolutely zero wind. If you want to go outside you need a windproof layer on top of it. 

Wind/waterproof clothing is very expensive, in part because it’s difficult to sew. 

Fur is like diamonds and pianos in that the resale value is a small fraction of the retail cost. Used fur coats sell for less than new high quality winter coats, and sometimes less than used. However fur requires oil changes every few years or it will ?explode?, which brings the cost of ownership up. Fur is heavier than down or fleece per unit warmth. It does not handle moisture or crushing well.