Quantifying Your Closet Part 2

In a previous post, we discussed a few statistics to help us measure our wardrobe's sustainability. Now, we are going to put this into practice with an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet consists of three sheets - Summary, Inventory and Daily Log - which are discussed in turn below.

Summary

This sheet serves two purposes: it provides a few auto-updating statistics about your wardrobe (as seen in the image above) and it is also where you will configure the spreadsheet to best meet your needs.

The first configuration option is referred to as a category, which is something every apparel item will be associated with. A category represents a class of apparel such as footwear. This information will used to populate the pie chart seen above and as a means of sorting your inventory (as discussed below).

Adding a 'Jackets' category

To enter a new category or edit an existing one, simply click on the desired cell and type a category name. The COUNT cell is automatically calculated and represents the number of items associated with a particular category in your inventory. 

The second configuration option are your brands. Every brand will have an associated score, which you will get from Rank A Brand.

Adding Lee and its Rank A Brand score

As with categories, you can add as many brands as you want. With each brand, you also need to input a Rank A Brand score. If you disagree with a ranking or one of your brands is not ranked, you can input your own score as well (here is an example report, should you want to independently research a brand).

Inventory

This sheet is where you will add your apparel items. Each item needs to have a brand, category, type, name, purchase date and cost.

An item's type is a means of grouping items across categories (whereas categories group across types). For example, you may have items with a type of Running within both the Footwear and Shorts categories. An item's name is what you will refer to it in your Daily Log (see below). It can be anything from a model such as "Adizero Tempo 8" to a personalized name like "my favorite jacket."

Auto-calculating inventory cells

After filling in the required information, Brand Rating, Item Age, Wear Count and Cost-Per-wear will be calculated for each item. You can read more about these statistics in our previous post. 

Daily Log

Adding a Daily Log entry

This is where you will enter your outfits on a daily basis. An outfit log consists of a comma-delimited list of items addressed by their name (as described in the previous section). Here is an example outfit log:

shoe1,pants1,shirt1

where shoe1, pants1 and shirt1 are names of items in our inventory. Wear Count (as mentioned in the previous section) is calculated based on the number of times an item appears in your Daily Log.

General Workflow

On a typical day, you should only need to create one or more entries in your Daily Log. When you purchase a new item, you'll want to update your inventory and possibly your brands.

Download

You can download the spreadsheet here. It should work as intended with any version of Microsoft Excel. Google Sheets, however, seems to change the styling a little.

Quantifying Your Closet

In this post we will discuss some ways that you can track the eco-friendliness of your wardrobe, which we will collectively refer to as your Sustainability Score. While this is no doubt far from a perfect science, there are a few straightforward statistics that we can use to analysis our apparel decisions.

As we cover each individual Sustainability Score factor, we will reference the following data:

Brand	Cost	Purchase Date	Wear Count
Nike	$110.00	04/06/2014	‎ 100
Vans	$62.00	02/08/2016	5
Levi's	$69.50	07/22/2015	10
Hollister	$9.95	09/16/2012	40

Brand Rating (BR)

As discussed in a previous post, there is a website called Rank A Brand that "assesses and ranks consumer brands in several sectors on sustainability and social responsibility." Each brand is ranked on a scale of 0 - 32, with 32 being the most sustainable. We will use these rankings as our first factor.

To find a rating, we go to Rank A Brand's search page and type in our brand's name. This gives us ratings of 10, 5, 11 and 3 -- for an average Brand Rating (ABR) of 7.25. This is definitely on the low side, as we want to get as close to 32 as possible.

Item Age (IA)

The goal of this factor is to avoid a high apparel turnover rate. We do this with the following formula:

IA = [months since purchase] / 6

This rewards us for every 6 months we own an item. In other words, our sustainability score will increase as our average item age increases. For our first item, the calculation is:

841 days / 30.1467 = 27.89 months / 6 = 4.65

Repeating the above calculation for our other items gives us IAs of 4.65, 0.93, 2.04 and 7.78, and a median Item Age (MIA) of 3.33 (note: we use a median instead of a mean to avoid giving too much weight to any particular item).

Cost-Per-Wear (CPW)

This factor is easily the most used and its formula is also quite simple:

CPW = cost / [times worn]

Essentially, it is designed to reward high usage of apparel: every time you wear an item, you decrease its CPW. Using our example data, we get CPWs of $1.10, $12.4, $6.95 and $0.25. This gives a median CPW (MCPW) of $4.03.

Sustainability Score

SS = (ABR + MIA) - MCPW

In our case, we have

SS = (7.25 + 3.33) - 4.03 = 6.55

This is obviously a pretty low score. However, we can improve our score by (1) buying from brands with a high Brand Rating, (2) keeping our apparel for as long as possible and (3) wearing our apparel as often as possible. Obviously, the best way to achieve this is to be selective with what you buy. In other words, it's much easier to meet the above criteria with a small wardrobe than it is with a large one.

What's your Sustainability Score?

(Check back soon to find out how to turn all of this into an easy-to-use spreadsheet!)