What to Do With All Your Old Clothes
Before *this* happens.
Sell Them Directly
Besides the usual suspects like Ebay and Craigslist, selling your clothes online is as easy as snapping a pic on your smartphone. Apps like Poshmark and Vinted make it simple to sell items straight from your closet, and they pretty much do all the work—you just have to accept payment, print out the pre-paid label, and send it off. Easy.
Send Them Off to Be Sold
Don't care to upload a pic one by one and ship everything off separately? Going to toss or donate the clothes you clean out anyway and just looking to make some money while you're at it? Sites like ThredUp and Threadflip are for you. ThredUp lets you request a clean-out bag which you can fill with the items you're getting rid of. Then, send it in (it has a pre-paid label) and wait to see how much you've earned. Threadflip is a little bit of a hybrid between a direct sale and the bag-and-cash-in system, which allows you to pick *some* items you'd rather sell yourself, one at a time (think: designer bags), with other stuff going straight to the site for re-sale on their end.
Sell Them in Person
If you don't like the idea of sending off your stuff via mail, or you just want to be able to take some stuff back if it doesn't get the price you want, stores like Plato's Closet, Buffalo Exchange, Beacon's Closet, and other higher-end thrift stores will probably be your jam. Just grab your stuff, head to the nearest location, and an employee will sort your stuff and give you a pay-out pricing—which you can take or leave. Pro tip: Make sure to call to see what items they're currently accepting or looking for before you schlep your entire wardrobe there to get offered $1.50 for a Forever21 shirt.
Donate Them
There are plenty of local places to donate items (Salvation Army, Goodwill, Housing Works, etc.) but you can also grab a bag and send it in to different programs that make a difference. Schoola.com has a few programs that take your gently used women's and kids' clothing, sells it, and then sends 40% of the profits to affiliated charities. (Their newest? The Malala Fund.) FashionProject.com runs a similar program.
There. Congrats! Your closet is officially ready for new clothes.
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Samantha Leal is the Deputy Editor at Well+Good, where she spends most of her day thinking of new ideas across platforms, bringing on new writers, overseeing the day-to-day of the website, and working with the awesome team to produce the best stories and packages. Before W+G, she was the Senior Web Editor for Marie Claire and the Deputy Editor for Latina.com, with bylines all over the internet. Graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University with a minor in African history, she’s written everything from travel guides to political op-eds to wine explainers (currently enrolled in the WSET program) to celebrity profiles. Find her online pretty much everywhere @samanthajoleal.