Wearing charity shop clothes changed my life

Three days into an ambitious challenge to wear only charity clothes for a year, Caroline Jones thought to herself, "what have I done?".

It was 3 January 2015. Her mother had died from breast cancer six weeks earlier and she had decided to raise money for Cancer Research UK (CRUK) in a year-long challenge which - to reflect the fact that only her underwear was new - she called Knickers Model's Own.

A volunteer at her local Harpenden CRUK shop, the then 46-year-old committed to finding different looks from the charity's shops every day of the year and post her outfits on social media.

But in those first weeks and still in the early stages of grief, she was beginning to have regrets.

"I remember thinking actually I don't think I want to do this for a year now, how do I get out of it?," she said.

"I remember going onto my Just Giving page and trying to extract myself from it.

"About 10 days in, I had raised £35."

Then everything changed.

Her campaign was noticed by the BBC and everything snowballed. Other media started calling and a couple of days later, 97,000 people had visited her Facebook page.

The campaign caught the public's imagination and she raised about £70,000 from donations, proceeds from a sale of the clothes and from her book, A Year of Frugal Fashion.

She now calls 2015 "life-changing" but first she had to reflect on exactly what she had done.

Creating content every day was a relatively new concept but she connected quickly with her audience, who she describes as a "continual lovely warm community", and they have stayed with her.

She had to learn how to take a good picture, feel confident in front of a camera, find her voice and be a public face of a campaign.

"I always refer to it as charity fundraising lite," she said, "because I thought the actual art of dressing up in comparison to climbing a mountain seemed a bit of a cop out but I didn't appreciate how hard it was going to be.

"It was intense, I was grieving, I had three children at primary school and I don't think I stopped to really think about where it was going and how was I going to get to the end.

"And then the other side of it, the public side, was just this amazing warm reaction on social media to everything I was doing."

Now 56, she has admitted her "grief got pushed down the line" but said she has come out the other side as a more confident woman who hopes she can help others.

"If I'm honest I don't think I even grieved in 2016, because I was straight into writing my book," she said. "I think I was probably pushing my grief to one side as I was so determined to keep fundraising.

"Later on, I allowed myself to feel proud.

"The years that followed allowed me to reflect on what I'd done and I realised I was finally doing something that I absolutely love - style and fashion and representing a group of women.

"Anyone can follow me but a lot are in my age bracket and if anything I'm doing it for them who don't feel spoken to because brands are pushing content at a much younger generation."

The landscape has also changed in terms of talking about sustainability and she likes to think she was at the start of that.

"Nobody really used the word sustainable back in 2015, no-one was talking about second hand and the green agenda or climate change in the way that is so normal now," she said.

"I thought raising all that money was amazing but I'm really proud of how it opened up the conversation more broadly across the charity retail sector because I was very aware of other charities looking in."

She is regularly called on to tell her story and has spoken at events such as the Good Clothes Show at the NEC in Birmingham, where she talked about putting second-hand clothes first, and to school children about how to articulate your message.

She also advises charity fundraising teams about connecting with donors.

"Fundamentally you need to appeal to your audience whether that's a lovely charity shop front window or making something impactful," she said.

"You need to do something that's got a hook. Just me wearing clothes every day probably wouldn't have had an impact if I hadn't used the word knickers.

"The media picked up on that. It was tongue in cheek but people stopped and wanted to know what it was."

But she had mostly learned about herself, she said.

"I worked out I was happy doing my own thing with second hand, so many people were joining the party and talking about repurposing and recycling so I felt part of a very different community.

"I physically have changed but I love where I am right now.

"I look back at all my photos [from 2015] and I can see the sadness behind my smiles early on.

"Then I can see this more confident woman coming out the other end and now I feel much more confident about my own body image, being a woman in my mid-50s, feeling relevant and just wearing what the hell I want to wear."

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