← Her Style Podcast | Shopping, Color Palettes, Fashion, Wardrobe, Outfits, Clothing
Her Style Podcast | Shopping, Color Palettes, Fashion, Wardrobe, Outfits, Clothing
204 | My 5 Biggest Takeaways from the 'Buy Now!' Netflix Documentary and How I'm Implementing Them in 2025
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I’ve been inspired into action by documentaries like Food Inc. and The Social Dilemma before, but never has one felt so relevant to my work than the recent Netflix release, Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy. If you haven’t seen it yet, this film is...
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I've been inspired into action by documentaries like Food Inc. And the Social Dilemma before, but never has one felt so relevant to my work than the recent Netflix release, Buy the Shopping Conspiracy. If you haven't seen it yet, this film is not just about apparel. It also covers the tricks that brands use to get us to buy more electronics, plastics, and so on, and the impact this has on our lives and the world at large. But the point of this episode is not to give you a guilt trip. Instead, I want to share my five biggest takeaways from the documentary, along with simple ways I'm implementing more more changes in 2025. You're already here because you want to buy less and shop smarter. So let's talk about how we can do even better together in the year ahead.
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Welcome to Her Style Podcast where we're all about empowering you to show up and get dressed every day with confidence. I'm your host, Heather Riggs, a 15 year and counting certified image consultant and color specialist ready to build a wardrobe and a personal style you. So let's get started.
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It does feel a little bit mean to put this episode out just two days before Christmas, the biggest buying and gifting holiday of the year. And before you assume that I'm over here about to shame and condemn you for your spending this season, I'm right alongside you, my friend. We only have one child, and while I wouldn't say that we go overboard at Christmas, I like to make sure he has enough gifts waiting under the tree that it doesn't go too quickly with him being the only one opening presents. Although this year we did decide to wrap up a few things that we needed to buy him anyway to make it look even more abundant. I'm whispering now because I realized I was about to tell you what some of these gifts are, and he's in the next room over playing because he's home now for the holiday break. So I won't tell you exactly what it is, but I will say we also love giving experience gifts to our families as well. But there's a good mix of buying and experiencing and all of those things. And the point of this episode is just to share that My husband and I watched the new Netflix documentary Buy now the Shopping Conspiracy a couple of weeks ago, and I was convicted yet again about the importance of buying less and shopping smarter. This isn't news to you. Maybe it's the reason that you've already stumbled upon and started listening to Her Style podcast. But I know that not everyone has access to Netflix or has this documentary at the top of their queue, and I will say it wasn't my absolute favorite. There was definitely some odd AI stuff that we didn't really love, a little unnecessary. But overall, the message was really important. So I wanted to give you a few of my biggest takeaways and share how I'm choosing to implement them, both personally and in my business in the year ahead. As always, just take and apply anything that resonates with you as well. So my first biggest takeaway from this film is that brands are producing more goods and styles faster than ever before. And I think that I knew this to a degree. Right. We all do. That's the introduction of fast fashion, and trends are turning over fast, faster and faster. They interviewed Roger Lee, who is a clothing manufacturer, and he actually said when he first joined, you basically had two seasons a year, so you would have something that would sell for six months. Now, with the introduction of fast fashion, it's forced other brands to think about having newness every month. He shared that if you look online, you can find some statistics that gap produces around 12,000 new items a year. H&M is like 25,000, Zara is like 36,000, and Shein is somewhere around 1.3 million new items a year. And so what opened up for me in this fact and that clothing brands in particular are producing more and more items every year to keep up with trends and demand and just to give consumers so much more choice and to get people to buy more. My challenge is for all of us to question whether we really need new. I think for myself, I tend to if I feel like there's a gap in my wardrobe, I will look at what a new option would be to purchase first. I do try to make my shopping list and always refer back to my budget for this season. But I feel more convicted now to question whether I need something brand new. Could I buy something used and maybe look at local consignment shops or look online for used products first before I turn to some of my preferred retailers? Another thing that is so important is to just style what we already own in better ways. I'm feeling very inspired and motivated to help my clients do more of this, to build even more resources into my group coaching program, Her Style Collective, and to make this a really big focus in my upcoming Wardrobe Revamp bootcamp starting on January 6th. If you haven't yet, take just a minute to grab your seat today. Before you forget, you can head to herstylellc.com bootcamp. The event's happening January 6th through the 9th. So we can kick your new off strong. And I would love to show you some new ways to get creative with the pieces that you already own in your wardrobe. I think you have a lot more gems in there than you might realize. It's all about putting them together in new and interesting ways. All right, the second takeaway from this documentary is that companies are making it easier to buy than ever before. Again, this is probably not shocking to you, but some really interesting information that was shared by Marincosta, who was a former user experience designer at Amazon, was that the entire goal at Amazon was to make it too easy to shop. So that anytime you think about needing any product, whether it's a toothbrush or a new pillow or anything under the sun, that your first thought would be to look at Amazon. And she said that was the point, to reduce your time to think a little bit more critically about a purchase you thought you wanted to make. We were constantly developing new ways to get you to buy, she said. And they talked in the documentary about how there used to be a stopgap. You would have the idea that you wanted or needed something, but instead of it just being almost instantaneously delivered to you, you had to get up, get in your car, drive to the store, park the car, walk into the store, find what you wanted, check out, get home, all of those things. And now when you have an immediate thought that you need or want something, you can find it with just the click of a button. And so it's really eliminated that time and space to think about whether this was an investment that we truly need to make. So the way that I'm implementing this takeaway is that it's so important to create our own stopgap. I've talked about this before. I highly encourage you to save any items that you're considering purchasing to a Pinterest window shopping board. Now, in the documentary, they suggest that you wait an entire month before making your purchase. But I understand when it comes to clothing in particular, sometimes you're shopping in a season for a season, and to wait too long of a time means that you're not going to be able to use it as much as you might want. So unless you are planning your upcoming wardrobe way ahead of the curve, I suggest that you at least try waiting one or two weeks before you actually complete your purchase. I know there's a risk there that it might sell out, but as we've just talked about, there are more and more things coming out all of the time. If it's not that it's going to be something better. So I definitely encourage you, and this is something I'm going to implement myself in the year ahead to wait at least one or two weeks before you follow through on any online purchases. I've also done shopping freezes for myself. I've done a whole summer shopping ban where I didn't purchase anything. I forced myself to think more creatively about how to remix what I already own. And if this is a real challenge for you, if you feel like you're doing a lot of impulse shopping online, the best thing that you could do could be to put yourself on a shopping freeze for a set period of time. I actually issued this as one of the potential challenges for your New Year last year, so I'll link up an episode for that in the show. Notes if you feel like this is something you want to dive deeper in, there's all kinds of information about how to do an effective shopping freeze in episode number 102. My 2024 style challenge for you takeaway number three is that items are designed intentionally to be replaced. There is something called planned obsolescence. I had actually never heard of that term before this documentary. But products are designed to break or be rapidly discarded. And they said just as we are on the treadmill of consumerism, companies are on the treadmill of having to extract more and more profits from us. So it's no surprise. We all know after a certain point in time our Apple phone iPhones stop working. We're kind of forced into buying the newest model. And it's because shareholders are expecting more and more profits each and every year. So companies feel a ton of pressure to get people to buy more. And part of this has turned into products being intentionally designed to break or be rapidly discarded. So of course here the goal or the implementation for the new year ahead is to buy less but better. Now the documentary talks about being more apt to have devices repaired and things like that. But when it comes to clothing, I think it's so helpful to prioritize quality pieces. And of course you could do the same thing and try to repair your clothing when you can. If you get a hole in a sweater or a rip in a pair of jeans, instead of throwing them in the trash and immediately replacing with something new, see if you could have a local seamstress or tailor do a quick repair job for you. I am going to be much better about this in the year ahead and making sure that I'm doing what I can to preserve the life of my pieces and to repair things whenever I possibly can. The fourth takeaway from this documentary is that waste is something we can't ignore any longer. They had a voiceover news reporter sharing that one recent estimate suggests returns, including those from Amazon, accounted for 5 billion pounds of waste in the US alone. I don't know where that statistic came from because it was just a voiceover. It wasn't credited to any particular resource. But they also did highlight a woman named Anna Sachs who is self proclaimed known as the Trash Walker. She prowls the streets of New York City exposing the perfectly good items that are intentionally destroyed and discarded by all kinds of brands, from Coach to Bath and Body Works to Starbucks. And oftentimes this has everything to do with brand image. If products don't sell, they don't want people taking their pieces out of the trash and reselling them at a discount or being a brand that's associated with the homeless in some cases. There were people who attested to this as previous employees of some of these companies and it was so sad to see. And Marin Costa, again the woman who was formerly with Amazon, said if you destroy stuff before it's even used once, that's insane. But somehow it equals profit for these companies. And the documentary also highlighted how much of these unused or even gently used products are ending up in the landfills. And we don't really think about what happens with our trash. I know I certainly didn't before watching this, but former Adidas brand president Eric Liedka pointed out that there's only three places it can go. The air, the land, or the water. He says, pick your poison. And it was really eye opening to see the amount of discarded clothing, shoes, all of these kinds of things all over the world. So, and it feels really important to me to do a better job of investigating and supporting more sustainable brands. I have talked about the Good on youn app so many times on the podcast. It's it's definitely my go to for finding brands that are creating ethically made clothing that are doing a good job with sustainability and environmental factors. They talked a lot in the documentary about greenwashing and companies that pretend to look like they're doing things for the environment but actually aren't implementing real effective change. So this feels really important to me in light of what I saw with the amount of trash and waste that's being produced. So again, in addition to looking for more used clothing options and reworking what I already have and better caring for those pieces, additionally, when I do want to bring in new things to look for supporting more local, sustainable brands. So definitely going to be relying more heavily on the good on you app and doing a better job on part to report better resources for you right here on the podcast as well. But I know for me, I do want to prioritize looking for natural fibers, things that will break down in time, things that don't use so much plastics and synthetic materials, looking for fair trade and fair labor practices in the retail companies that I support with my dollars. And of course, if you're feeling convicted, I encourage you to do the same alongside me. All right, the last takeaway from this documentary is that many recyclable products and programs are misleading. I've talked about some of these on the show and I provided them as resources to my clients. I was really sad to see what actually happened with a lot of these quote unquote recycled goods. So the film declares that we cannot recycle our way out of all this stuff that they want us to buy. They also had some interviews with Chloe Assam, who is a fashion designer from Ghana, and she said many brands encourage people in Europe and the US to donate their old clothes, but a lot of the donated clothing ends up being exported to places like Ghana. She says the problem is so many clothes are sent and we have no way to deal with this volume. We are 30 million people in Ghana and we, we have 15 million pieces of clothing coming in every week. And in the documentary, it was funny because just before this clip happened, my husband and I were talking about with the AI stuff that they put in, we couldn't really tell what was real, what was just computer generated. But they were showing her and some actual colleagues of hers going through mounds and mounds of shoes and clothing items that were strewn all along their beaches, washing right into the Gulf. It was so sad. They also showed electronics being quote, unquote recycled to places like Thailand, where the parts are stripped in unregulated and very unsafe ways in exposing workers and the environment to the toxic materials that are in them. Again, it was just incredibly eye opening. And so this convicted me very strongly to do a better job of researching recycling options, particularly for clothing. I've shared tons of resources before. In my program, I have a whole clothing giveaway guide that does have really incredible companies like, like Helpsie and Retold, recycling companies that are really doing their part to help keep clothing out of the landfills and make sure that things are truly recycled in really sustainable, ethical ways. So there are plenty of resources out there. We just need to do a better job of uncovering them and digging deeper to find out what actually happens with our pieces. So before you just take all of your clothing items over to H and M and trust that they're genuinely recycling them, I think that that part of what we need to do is be more diligent in asking questions and following the whole paper trail, if you will. I also am feeling more encouraged to explore local clothing swaps as a really great option or donating to local organizations. I've talked about dress for Success in the past as well, so there are plenty of great things that you can do with pieces that are no longer working for you. I am still an advocate for building a wardrobe that you love and eliminating pieces that aren't working for you as you go through your closet audit. But it's more important to think about where they're going and not just throwing things in the trash or recycling them to places that we don't really know where they end up going. So those are my five biggest takeaways. Those are some of the things that I'm gonna be doing both in my personal life and focusing on more here in the podcast and in my upcoming bootcamp to support all of us with being more conscious consumers and more responsible with what we do with the pieces that are no longer serving. So hopefully we can find ways to empower and uplift others with our unused clothing rather than contributing to the problem of over consumption and what it's doing for the environment and people around the world. So I hope that this has convicted you as well in some way. If you have the time, I definitely encourage you to watch the documentary. They also did share some really great ideas at the end about, you know, connecting with your local council members and switching from plastic to paper lids and of course saying no to fast fashion and single use items and just in general buying less. Someone at the end of the film shared that life is about the experiences and the people we're with and the stuff that we have supports it. But it's not the end. And whoever dies with the most stuff does not win. And I feel so aligned with that message and excited to bring that into my work even more in the year ahead. So I hope this didn't make you feel like too much of a downer. Hopefully it gave you a lot of ideas and encouragement to do better in 2025. I'm so excited to wish you the happiest holiday season. Don't feel any guilt about what you've already purchased. It's all about learning and growing and doing better together. So I definitely encourage you to come to my upcoming Wardrobe Revamp Bootcamp where we'll be sharing even more ways that you can better utilize what you already have. Again. You can head to herstylellc.com bootcamp sign up to join me January 6th through the 9th and I look forward to seeing you there my friend. Have a great Christmas if you celebrate and I will meet you right back here on Thursday for another Q and A episode. See you then.
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Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you want to stop copying everyone else's style and start dialing in your own swoon worthy signature look, head over to take my free 5 minute personal style quiz which you can find at the link in the show notes. If you've enjoyed our time together, please be sure to rate, review and subscribe to her style podcast so you never miss an episode. Finally, I invite you to make this a two way conversation and send me a DM over on Instagram eatherigstyle to let me know how I can best support you on your style journey. I'm always here for you in style and service. Until next time.