One of my favorite places to shop online is the second hand fashion site, ThredUp. At first I was nervous about buying second hand clothes online, but after my first order I was hooked. The quality of the items and low prices were better than anything I could find locally.

I live in a rural area and the clothes in our local thrift stores and consignment shops don’t offer a lot of variety, sizes or brands. There’s a lot of Wal-Mart and Old Navy clothing available and that’s about it. Meanwhile, ThredUp offers ALL.THE.BRANDS.

Just like in-person thrift shopping, online consignment shopping requires some strategy and skill to find the best deals. Here is how I use ThredUp to refresh my wardrobe each season.

Several Thred-Up Items I bought over the past few months.

Start With a List

While sometimes it’s fun to poke around and window shop online, I find this loosey-goosey approach leads to impulse buys of items I don’t really need or won’t actually wear. So when I decide it’s time for a wardrobe refresh, I make a list of items that I need or want. While I may end up buying things not on the list, just like in a brick and mortar store, going in with some sort of plan generally keeps me focused and saves me money and time.

Use the ThredUp Filters

Thred Up has thousands of items. Literally, thousands. You could spend days sifting through all the available clothes and accessories. As someone who does not want to spend all day on anything, let alone shopping, I use the filters Thred Up provides to drill down to the items that I would be most interested in. The filters I regularly include include:

Size

Depending on the brand of clothing, sizes can differ widely. Generally more higher end items run much smaller than larger brands like Old Navy or Sonoma. So I select my main size, US XLarge and will go a size down and size up. This means my filter includes items that are listed as large, XLarge, and XXL/1x. This ensures I get a good variety of choices for any items.

A note about sizing up: For the longest time I avoided ever sizing up a dress size. As part of lifelong conditioning by the Western Toxic Diet Culture, I believed if I bought a size bigger than I thought I should be, I was conceding defeat and losing the battle to shrink my body. For years I squeezed into medium dress sizes, telling myself that they would fit better when I just lost that last 5,10, 15 pounds. As a mid-sized woman, not only was I hella uncomfortable, it reinforced the idea that my body was something to be berated and hated and that if I wasn’t actively trying to shrink it or reshape it, I was lazy and undisciplined. When I finally decided to jump off the diet wagon once and for all, I began buying clothes that actually fit me and were comfortable. Sometimes that is a size large, or, depending on the brand, an XLarge or even a 1x. The sizes are simply guidelines for my body. They are not measurements of my worth as a person.

Condition ( aka Wear & Tear)

Thred Up gives you four conditions - Like New With Tags, Excellent, Good and Fair. I usually select Like New and Excellent. Most often I find that the prices on Good and Fair items are too high, for purchasing something that looks and feels second hand. My exception to this rule is anything made of leather, because worn leather often looks better than new, and jeans, especially levi’s. Because broken-in jeans are the best, imo.

Brand

I choose brands that I know will fit me well. Many higher end brands, which I wouldn’t buy anyway, run really small. For example, an extra large from Tory Burch brand has a 34 inch chest! Brands I regularly buy on Thred Up include Ann Taylor Loft, Gap, Old Navy, Daisy Fuentes, Land’s End, LL Bean, Levi’s, and Apartment 9. I feel like these brands fit most average sized women.

Price

Just because ThredUp is a second hand clothing site doesn’t mean everything on it is cheap. It carries a wide range of high end fashion items that run into the hundreds of dollars. And while it may delight many shoppers to find such good deals on brands like xx or xx, my tastes run a bit more beer and burgers. I usually set the filter for under $50 for outwear, shoes and jeans and under $25 for everything else. This lower price point still gives me more than enough options to choose from!

Color

I love this feature because it allows me to weed out any items that are in the wrong color. Generally, I wear the same palette of colors through most of the year. This includes pink, coral (so I select orange in the ThredUp filter) yellow, green, black, white and blue. I avoid purple, because it is not a color that I usually like to wear. Same with brown and gray, as they tend to wash me out. And while I like the color red, unless I am shopping for a holiday outfit, I tend to skip it. You can also filter by pattern or solid.

Fabric

I usually filter fabric depending on the type of item I am looking for. For example, for summer dresses I like a lighter, breathable fabric like cotton versus wool or polyester. For worktops I prefer Rayon because they don’t wrinkle.

So there you have it. A complete beginner’s guide to shopping on ThredUp! If you’d like some fashion inspiration to help you get started, especially if you are mid-sized or plus-sized, be sure to check out my fashion boards on Pinterest.