Best Results Organizing

Although Paper Doll generally focuses on managing your paper to be more organized and productive, sometimes we need to flip the picture, and look at ways to be more organized and productive to save (little green pieces of) paper. To that end, this post will review two wardrobe-oriented products from this year’s National Association of Professional Organizers Conference and Expo: one for helping you eliminate closet clutter, and one to change how you think about putting away your clothes. Both will help you save time and money, and maybe make you feel a little more fashionable.

MY WARDROBE GENIE

My Wardrobe Genie is the brainchild of Massachusetts-based Professional Organizer Susan Terkanian of AllSET Solutions. Susan explains My Wardrobe Genie as a personal clothing management assistant, a way to deal with the overwhelm of items in your closet with ease and confidence, but without undue expense. She has not only tested her system with real clients, she got input from a neuropsychologist!

The key to a working wardrobe is keeping clothes that fit (your body and your lifestyle) as well as flatter, but letting go of what misses the mark: even if it was pricey, even if you’ve got happy memories associated with it, even if it was a gift. Intellectually, you know that you’ll never wear that itchy, ugly sweater that you’ve been guilted into keeping all these years. And putting those slacks with the ripped hem back in the closet (because you forget about the hem, every time, until you put them on) is like putting an empty milk carton back into the fridge.

To reduce clothing clutter and get a handle on what you own, My Wardrobe Genie combines the two essentials of any working system: a physical set-up and a behavioral process.

For the closet, My Wardrobe Genie comes with five colorful, laminated divider placards that hang from your closet’s rods to divide your closet into zones. These placards designate:

• Discerning/Decided — This nifty placard divides your closet rod into two areas: what you know for sure that you’re keeping, and what you’re still noodling over in your head. Just that one initial sort as you return clean clothes to the closet, or work your way down the rod, sets the stage for making decisions. Does this fit me? Do I wear it? Does it look (and feel) good? If you know, it goes on the Decided side of the placard. If you are still working on discerning the value, or trying to figure out if it will be donated, discarded, or otherwise distributed elsewhere on the planet, it goes on the Discerning side. Everything in your wardrobe starts out on the “Discerning” side, but (as indicated), once you decide, you move it to the other side of the divider.
• Anything Pressing? — Aside from the hardy few who get their moments of Zen from ironing, not many people are a fan of getting out the ironing board and pressing their clothes. But if your to-be-ironed clothes are out of sight and piled in the laundry room, you’ll never be inspired to tackle the ironing, and if they’re mixed in with the other clean, ready-to-wear items, you’ll pass over them when you make haste to dress. Keeping all the to-be-ironed clothes together lets you know when it’s time to turn up the music and rock out (or zone out) while ironing.

• Mending and Alterations — Sure, it’s great for you to pull out the mending and put it by your sewing machine (or the bag to take to the tailor), but the truth is, at best, you’ll just be creating more piles that you probably won’t get around to addressing. With this section divider, you can see at a glance when you have enough items to make it worth zipping over to the tailor or blocking off time in your schedule to do mending. (For those wondering, for any “mending” more complicated than re-attaching a button, Paper Doll believes in the power of delegation! Why deny someone employment using skills that far surpass my own? Paper Mommy has taught me well.)
• Spare Hangers — Because putting an empty hanger back where you pulled it from is a guarantee that your closet will become disheveled quickly! Store all your spare hangers together to find the right kind when and where you need them.
• Customizable — There’s a blank placard for you to customize to your preference. Maybe you have work uniforms that you want to keep separate from your casual and dressy clothes. Or, perhaps you’re keeping maternity clothes handy for a planned-for blessed event. Make that closet zone work for you.

For those of us who categorize our clothes by color, weight, sleeve (or skirt) length, or other attributes, there’s no need to revise. You can still be that granular in organizing your closet — once you get things to the Decided zone.

Each My Wardrobe Genie kit comes with the five placards, five colorful, coiled elastic hanger cords (to attach the placards to the closet rod), a discard bag, a donation bag, and labels for the bags. Susan expects the My Wardrobe Genie online store to be in place this July.

Although pricing is not listed on the site, the original IndieGoGo campaign looked to price each kit at around $30.

In theory, could you do this on your own? Sure, but as with most organizing concepts, we find that if people could do them on their own, they would have already done so. My Wardrobe Genie gives you that extra guidance to move forward, physically and behaviorally. My only thought is that people with truly overstuffed closets (and/or bad lighting in their closets) may still need a little extra hand-holding from a friend or professional organizer to tackle the initial phases of whipping the closet into shape.

While My Wardrobe Genie is great for your closet, what do you do if you’ve got a lot of drawer-based clothing? For those who lack expansive (and sometimes expensive) walk-in closets, a small closet space means relegating anything that doesn’t have to be hung up to whatever drawer space exists. But if you’ve lots of clothing but not a lot of drawers, what’s a fashionista to do?

PLIIO^®

Luckily, there’s Pliio^®. Longtime readers of this blog know how much I appreciate this innovation that lets you, for all intents and purposes, file your clothing, upright! But in case you’re new to what Pliio has to offer, I’ve got a little recap. Co-created by Canadian Professional Organizer Clare Kumar of Streamlife, Pliio is one of those brilliant tools that makes you wonder how and why it took so long for someone to come up with it.

Pliio, itself, comes in two parts: the Pliio® Clothing Filers™ (17″ long x 8″ wide x 1/4″ thick), which are essential to the process, and the Pliio® Organizing Boxes (9″ x 11″x 5″), which serve as the wardrobe equivalent of a desktop file box, filing cabinet or drawer. The basics are pretty simple — practically any article of clothing can be wrapped and folded around the Pliio clothing filers. I’ve seen Clare work magic with T-shirts, jerseys, light-weight knits and sweaters, as well as soft (sort of flowy) unstructured bottoms, like yoga pants or skirts, and even dresses. The thinner the fabric, the better it works, and the instructions say that it all works best when there’s about three inches of excess material beyond the edge of the filers.

See it in action:

Once your clothing properly Pliioed (what? it’s not a verb yet?), you can easily lined up clothing wherever you want it to go — in your drawers, on your closet shelves, or even in your luggage! Use the organizing boxes to keep them perfectly aligned for added orderliness. You only need six inches of depth in your drawers or suitcases to accommodate Pliio Clothing Filers, and you can turn the boxes on their sides (for six inches of depth and nine inches of height) to stack filed clothes anywhere, even on CD/DVD shelves!

For a while after Pliio’s release, you could only buy it on QVC, but it’s available (in the U.S. and Canada) at Bed, Bath and Beyond for about $20/set of ten filers.

It’s not easy to impress me with “doodads,” and I’m fairly frugal, so I only buy what I find to be flawless, but I’ve given Pliio as gifts. One friend with refined tastes — who is already incredibly organized (and isn’t even a professional organizer!) — liked the system so much, she went out and bought more, and Pliioed her husband’s T-shirt wardrobe!

My Wardrobe Genie and Pliio are just two inventive ways to get control of your clothing, get organized, and stop wasting time and money on closet clutter.