Style with a Purpose Meet Up

I am not, nor will I ever be, a fashion blogger. The only question I ask myself when "styling" an outfit in the morning is "which dress matches my Adidas sandals?" (The answer of course is all of them). That being said, when I heard about the Style with a Purpose event at the Goodwill in Nashville from Betsy, I thought I would give it a go. I loved going to thrift stores with my aunt when I was a kid, and haven't browsed one in a while.

After an afternoon in Nashville, Caitlin and I met up at the Goodwill in Bellevue to check out the event.  There were giftcard givaways, a photo booth, and an assortment of people with overflowing carts milling about the store.  Nearly a dozen bloggers had racks set up down the middle of the store housing their own finds from Goodwill that they wanted to share with the event's participants.

The racks held some super cute, and some super interesting items.  (But actually. Everything was either really cute, or really I-would-never-wear-this-in-a-million-years).  But, to each their own. As a girl whose typical outfit is running shorts and a t-shirt, I have ZERO room to talk about style! That being said, it was fun to see the stylish and name brand things 

While the event was a neat idea, I felt there was some room for improvement. There were only a few dressing rooms and a fairly decent line with carts literally FULL of clothing that people wanted to try on. I know that its not possible to create more dressing rooms out of thin air, but even having more full length mirrors set up around the store would have been helpful.

Another addition I would make to the event would be to have the bloggers actually style the garments that they picked out.  Caitlin and I would often see a piece that was super cute but both say, "I have no idea what I would wear that with!" or "This is fun but I have no idea WHEN I would wear it!" Perhaps this event was more directed at people that already know how to style cute or unique items, but since I am not one of those people I was a little disappointed.

I ended up buying a pink skirt to use for my Halloween costume, and a black and white polka dotted blouse from Betsy's stash (because I'm all about the fun patterns). Caitlin found this awesome dress that she rationalized buying because she's a teacher and surely she'll "need this ridiculous dress for some ridiculous school event, right?"  

For 99 cents, how could you pass this up?

I rarely have the patience to dig through racks of things, and I'm pretty particular about the thrift stores I shop in. If they're in an unclean area of town I usually steer clear.  My thrift shopping usually consists of leaving with a pile of books and maybe a random thing that I can use for a craft project, but browsing through the blogs of the ladies featured in the event may have inspired me to browse the clothing racks the next time I pass by a (clean-ish) thrift store like Goodwill!