So, I had my questions. Now, I just had to get down to the nitty-gritty details of figuring out what data I actually needed to collect. In the spirit of full disclosure, when I first started thinking about this project a few months ago, I went a little crazy. The possibilities were endless!!!! I could see how many wool items i had! how many different sizes I bought! The average age of my clothes! This was the point where my eyes glazed over and my social life took a sharp down turn. I had to remind myself of one of the first rules in data analytics: "Remember what you're trying to measure".
With my list of core questions as a road map, I came up with 6 buckets of information:
- Item Type and Style
- Purpose
- Season
- Color
- Store/Brand
- Rating--How did it make me feel?
The first three are really key to figuring out what exactly I own and what I need. The 4th item, "Color", is a way to see if most of my clothes fell into a single color family and to help me in putting outfits together. The "Store/Brand" category will tell me where most of the things I buy are from. The last category, "Rating", is something I've been doing in my head for a while. It all started when I'd go shopping with my husband, and to help me decide if something was worth buying, he'd rate it for me on a scale from 1 to 10. I may not always agree or follow his recommendations but it's a really easy way of seeing if you absolutely love something and it makes you feel fabulous or if you should hold off for something better.
I may add additional categories or lose some of these as I go along, but they will hopefully be a nice balance between, collecting too much data (a.k.a turning into a crazy cat lady) and getting the information I actually need.
**in putting these buckets together, I realized that none of them deal with price, which is one of my side items. I'm thinking that for now, I'm going to give up tracking that one. I'm not sure that I want to can remember what I paid for every single item of clothing.
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