2025 retroactive

No. 58: Did I stick to my word? Let’s find out!

If you’ll remember, last year I started 2025 with a question: am I better than I was this time last year? Today, as we start the second month of 2026, I ask the same question. As a refresher, my primary goals in 2025 were to achieve the following metrics:

• 30 net new items for the entire year (around 20% of my consumption for 2024)

• Sub 3% error rate (which allows me a single regret item for 2025 - but hopefully I’ll have none)

• Rent or borrow for weddings and events

• Avoid making a buying decision in the moment: if it’s meant to be, it will be there the next day or week

As the year developed, I found myself generally much more thoughtful about purchases on the whole. I also found myself looking for loopholes: does a vintage / pre owned item count? It does if your primary goal is a decrease in spend, it doesn’t if your primary goal is to improve your ecological footprint. Do accessories count? Do shoes and bags fall into a different category? What about gifts? I became much more ingrained in the content creation community in 2025, which means I was often sent items gratis from brands. Do these items count? They probably count if you’re focused on your ecological footprint, but probably not if your goal is to decrease your spend.

For a goal I set myself, I really wanted to get out of it, didn’t I? The first lesson I learned from this process is that I needed to have a better “why” governing my actions. If you had asked me a year ago, I would have told you that I wanted “to have a more timeless wardrobe” and perhaps reduce my ecological footprint. But were these goals specific enough? Unlikely! A reminder that goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.

My goals for 2025 were MART, but perhaps not S enough.

With that, let’s take another look at 2024, and a new look at how I fared in 2025.

In 2024…

• I purchased 134 new items of clothing (not including activewear)

• I regret 8 items I purchased this year

• I will not tell you the total cost of the items I purchased this year

• The total cost of the items that I regret is $900

• My error rate is 5%

In 2025…

• I purchased 49 net new items of clothing

• 33 of these items were new, while the other 16 were vintage or consignment

• 27 were clothing, and 22 were accessories (shoes, bags, belts)

• I attempted to rent clothing for a few weddings and events, and the items never showed up or showed up late. This was outside of my control, and will no longer be a goal moving forward (until the landscape changes)

• I regret nothing

• My error rate is 0%

So, sure - maybe my “new” item count, in the strictest sense of the word, fell right over that expected 30 count at 33, but does that match the intention of the goal when set? I don’t really think so. That being said, do I think the difference between new and vintage is important (and something I want to track moving forward)? Yes!

A 0% error rate is pretty compelling but how relevant is that data point? Is the goal to enjoy and wear the items you bought in January just a year later, or is that the wrong metric? Perhaps the real metric should be how many items I get rid of every year. If I’ve had those items over 5 years, they have served their time and do not count, but perhaps they do count if they’ve been purchased in the last 5 years?

All of this analysis begs the question: how long can we actually expect to keep, wear, and love our clothing? And how is the overall decrease in quality across the board (for many brands) impacting the lifetime value of the items we purchase? How does this hold up during life changes: perhaps your maternity clothing has a shorter life than your designer bags - but how tied should I be to the decisions I made for my wardrobe years ago?

My best answer - it depends. I granted myself some leniency for a few years in my late 20s: my style and ability to afford items with increased longevity shifted relatively dramatically from 22 or 23 to five years later at 27 or 28. But now that I’m the ripe old age of 31, I’m not so sure I deserve that grace any longer when 27 year old Ellie was perfectly capable of buying timeless items. This year, I’ll track not only my current error rate, but any items I get rid of that have been purchased since I was 27 (5 years ago).

I strongly believe that pre loved or vintage items should be a freebie for 2026: they have zero ecological impact, do not require the “is it trendy or do I really like it” internal monologue, and dovetails nicely since we’ve determined that decreasing spend is not my primary goal.

The newest and most puzzling quagmire I now find myself in as a content creator is how I measure gifted brand items. These items:

• Certainly count toward my ecological footprint

• Do not contribute towards a larger spend-based goal

• Can make me feel a bit icky if I overindulge

So what do I do with that discomfort?

The “icky” feeling is data. Maybe my discomfort isn’t really about whether these “count” toward goals, but about maintaining agency and intention in my wardrobe. If I accept 20 gifted items that align with my wardrobe vs. 5 that don’t, those are very different scenarios even if both are “free.”

I should consider a quality threshold instead of a count. What if gifted items only enter my wardrobe if they meet the same bar as something I would spend my own money on? This preserves the intentionality without punishing myself for opportunities that come with content creation. The question becomes: “Would I have bought this if it weren’t free?” rather than “Does this count?”

The ecological footprint question cuts both ways. Yes, accepting gifted items contributes to consumption. But if I’m creating content that helps my audience make better purchasing decisions, there’s arguably a net positive impact. That doesn’t mean accepting everything, but it might mean the calculus is more nuanced than pure minimalism.

What about a “gifted items I kept” metric? Perhaps I track what I accept vs. what stays in my wardrobe after 6-12 months. That would capture both my selectivity and the true impact on your consumption patterns.

So what are my new and improved goals for 2026?

• 30 new items (meaning: brand new from the brand, purchased myself)

• 20 gifted items I kept (after 6 months - this will need to be a waterfall metric as items continue to trickle in)

• 5 donated items from 2021-2026 (as proxy for error rate)

• Unlimited vintage or pre-loved items (let’s start here: this might undermine my ecological footprint goal more than I think. Yes, these items already exist, but consumption is still consumption - especially if it’s feeding a dopamine loop. But maybe that’s a 2027 problem!)

This feels like the right starting point for 2026: more specific than last years goals, since I was able to really zero in on what my intentions were by setting them.

Hope you’re all setting goals around consumption for 2026 yourself - whether that be clothing, technology use / media consumption, or whatever is important to you!