What's This Place? Behind the Clicks and Mortar with Miranda Black
What's This Place? Behind the Clicks and Mortar with Miranda Black
What is Poshmark?
For the 3rd season of What's This Place? Podcast, I'm gonna tell some stories and spill some tea (or some neon pink dye) on fashion .
What have Lucky Sevens got to do with launching a Poshmark Account?!
Yer gonna need to go inside to find out :)
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Hi guys, my name's Miranda Black and this is what's this Place Behind the Clicks and Mortar. Now, today, for me, recording right now my reality, it's March 17th 2024. Now, for you it's probably not that day, it's another day, but I just want to call out this day because on March 17th 17 years ago, which was actually 2007, at 497 Bloor Street West a lot of 7s I opened my first bricks and mortar store. Now that that store was not really what I truly wanted, it wasn't my dream store at all, but it is a really big part of my path in this world. So I just want to stop and honor that day. But also I want to make an announcement, and I couldn't think of a more perfect day to do that than March 17th, the 17th anniversary of my retail journey way back in 2007 at 497 Bloor Street West.
Miranda Black:Because 7s, they are a classy, not classy, they're classic, they're kind of classy, but it's a classic lucky number, lucky 7s. Which made me wonder why are 7s so lucky? And because I'm a research junkie, not just for fabrics like why do cotton and linen feel so darn good together? They do. Just check it out. Whenever you see cotton and linen, just feel it. Ugh, it's delicious, but that's research for another podcast.
Miranda Black:Why is 7 such a lucky number? So I started to research and it does have something to do with like the 7 original planets as we could see them with the naked eye, which led to the 7 days of the week. I just skimmed that part, but then they went into how the 7 has traditionally been written Like. At first it was just kind of like a 1 with a curve at the top like an upside down J, but then it gradually morphed into the 7 we know today. But even that is kind of different around the world. Like I write my 7s with a line through the middle of the stick and that's only common to a handful of countries. It's like the seven in this way of writing the seven is saying I am not a one. Look at the line through my middle, I am a seven with a sexy waist. And I remember the moment I discovered this way of writing my sevens, because it's not how I learned the seven when I was a little kid. I discovered it in maybe third or fourth grade and I just I took the time to change my habit of writing the regular seven and I started writing the seven with a line through the middle, and I don't think it was all that easy to change. It was really deliberate the look of my new seven. At that time it was more important to me than the times table which I was actually learning.
Miranda Black:And it isn't easy to change a habit like you're writing. If you've ever done one of those behavioral therapy exercises where you do something habitual, like like brushing your teeth, you do it a bit differently for a week, like you brush your teeth with the wrong hand for a whole week, and the experiment is just there to show you how hard it is to change a habit. Because let me tell you it was hard to brush my teeth with my left hand and it brought up a bunch of feelings like this sucks, I cannot do that, this is a waste of time, I don't want to do this. And you just listen to all those thoughts and you observe them, like how does it make me feel to do something out of my comfort zone? And what thoughts do I tell myself when I'm trying something? That's new and not easy?
Miranda Black:But when you're a kid, you're constantly doing new stuff, like adding a line to your sevens or teaching your eyebrow to raise up like just the one. Raise up that one eyebrow. I'm trying to do it right now. I can still do it a little bit because I spent like real time in the backseat of my car not my car, the backseat of my parents car teaching. My one eyebrow was my left, to raise it up so that when someone said something interesting or if I found something cool, I could raise up that eyebrow. And I think it probably looked kind of precocious on a nine year old. But my sister's boyfriend he could do it and he used that eyebrow lift like a laser. He would have been a teenager at the time but he seemed like an adult to me and I honestly believed that this guy was destined to be the next Prime Minister of Canada based on that eyebrow lift alone. So I taught myself way back.
Miranda Black:When you don't even notice the work that goes into teaching yourself something like that or you notice it but you love it there's a juice behind it that gives you the momentum to just practice raising your left eyebrow like a thousand times until you got it, or remembering to write your sevens with a line through it, even if you got to go back and correct the sevens and write the lines all through, the ones that you forgot, and you do it with zero resentment. It's just the juice of loving. It sustains you. Now, that's not how I felt with the tooth brushing exercise that I hated. I was an adult, I had my way, I had my style, but it was such a great exercise on how stuck we can get in our lanes in our style and I wondered if it also relates to our dressing style, because I've gone through this huge transformation since I closed my store in 2019. And I would have been going through this transformation with or without the pandemic. I can see that now, looking back, Now that we're coming out on the other side, I know that many of the habits I had as a bricks and mortar store owner they needed to go, but the pandemic made it a longer process. But the great thing is that, because of the pandemic, I am not alone.
Miranda Black:We are dealing with transformations on a weekly basis. Right now. It's an age of transformation. You can call it the accelerator age or the age of loneliness I've heard it called that or the AI age, but whatever you choose to call this time we're in. It is all about transformation. It is the age of brushing your teeth with your opposite hand or writing your sevens with a new flourish every single week, and we can either resent it and fight it and refuse to try, or we can just practice with something new. Maybe not brushing your teeth, because, honestly, once the week was done, I just happily went back to right handed tooth brushing. But the lesson it can trickle into other areas. So that's why I'm using today, the 17th of March, the 17th anniversary of becoming a bricks and mortar retailer, to announce that I started selling online. I think I'm having a hearty check here.
Miranda Black:It's something I said I would never do, because how can you check out the fit, the fabric, how can I do my research? Well, the thing is I get to do the research for you and I love that. That gives me the juice. So it's all pre-loved or vintage clothing and the great surprise of this work to me is that I get to do so much more research than I did in my store. When you have a store, you carry well, in my store it was a boutique, so not as many items as if we had like a department store or whatever, but we had maybe 30 main brands, that's 30 companies to research, and I only added new brands maybe once a season. But now I source my items, I have 60 garments. It's often 60 different labels with 60 different fabric contents. Oh my God, it's so great and vintage, true vintage.
Miranda Black:It is wild to research and track down because there was no internet when these clothes were being born. Many of the brands that I read they're out of business, especially when they're from the last century and unfortunately, a lot of amazing heritage brands have gone out of business in the last five years. They were around for 50, 100 years and it just, it just my heart goes out to the family-owned brands who had to deal with the crush of fast fashion and the decisions they had to make and the knowledge that they were so great and they had such great quality and they paid their employees a living wage here in Canada and they had to compete with this crap of fast fashion. And the crap was winning and you could even say it has won. But just let's just take a moment to pour one out, for all that's been lost in fashion in such a short period of time. But I feel like I'm saving and preserving the pieces that I find for future lovers of textiles who do value quality and history. So this is a work in progress. It's not polished and that alone is an uncomfortable state of being, because I like to unveil things when they've been vetted and they're as close to perfect as I possibly make them.
Miranda Black:My fifth anniversary party comes to mind, when I had I just had. I had the perfect party. I had the perfect window display and the perfect caterer. I wore a fabulous dress and I'm actually right now trying to remember what happened to that dress. Maybe I lent it to somebody, but I had employees and a team. But this is me now writing my sevens with lines through them. So what's this place? It's me on Poshmark. Yeah, yeah, I'm. I'm choosing Poshmark, which feels super unglamorous to say, but I think it's a great place to get my feet wet Just to figure out logistics and shipping and packaging and do my research and make mistakes, cause that's business. We're all going to make mistakes. You can search for me the D-Growth Diva, but yeah, I'm selling online on Poshmark and those are words I never thought I would say.
Miranda Black:But before I go, I just want to share something I learned about fashion, or I want to. I just want to do this little segment. It's something I learned about fashion or clothing, something I find fascinating. So this one is about the Aaron sweater. Do you know the Aaron sweater? A-r-a-n.
Miranda Black:It's that traditional sweater that has that fisherman type quality to it, or like a person who smokes cloves, cigarettes and has a beret or whatever. It's not dyed, so it's wool color. The wool color is like a sheep color, beige. I actually had a really gorgeous one I found on a trash bin in New York. It was folded really nicely and I just nabbed it right away, stuffed it in my backpack because I knew it was quality, even though I barely knew anything about fashion back then. I was just sort of starting to know about fashion.
Miranda Black:But this week I was listening to this podcast called the blind boy podcast. You should really queue it up. And well, I did know this part because I actually grew up on a sheep farm that sweaters they repel water due to the oil in the sheep it's the lanolin, and if you stroke a sheep your hand can get quite oily, just like rub it in because it's really it's good for your skin. But nowadays they strip off most of that oil off the wool because I imagine it would be kind of stinky. Sheep are a little bit stinky and it would stain all your furniture and you know what? You're not at sea, so you don't need that kind of weather protection. But what I didn't know is the Aran Island sheep. They are extra oily sheep. They're super water repellent and the knitting patterns inside the sweater. I think some of them people call them cable knit. That's just one of the patterns within an Aran sweater. It's like the one that looks like a rope or you can have these little noblies on them or honeycomb.
Miranda Black:But there's this myth that Wikipedia says isn't true. They say that the patterns in the Aran sweaters have no meaning at all and I just, I just can't prescribe that Like no meaning. These pagans who had such reverence for the sea and the wind and nature, just knitting rope patterns or honeycomb patterns, you know, randomly into the sweaters of their men, with no meaning or thought into them? Yeah, I don't, I don't think so. I strongly feel in my bones that they must have had some meaning to them. But the this guy, blind boy, he goes on to say that the sailors, or the fishermen, not only did they have their Aran sweaters on but they also had these patterns knitted into their socks. And the idea of the myth of it is that the Aran socks would have been knitted with patterns that were unique to each individual fisherman. So if their body got lost at sea, the body might decompose, but the Aran socks with the lanolin protecting it wouldn't, and you could identify the body by the pattern woven into the socks. That is fashion, people. Oh my God, I love that fashion story. Whether it's true or not, it's just a great story.
Miranda Black:If you're interested in the Aran sweater has been peaked, just search for one on Poshmark. You don't have to buy new or knit one, but I don't have any in my closet. I did a search on Poshmark. There's lots. It's not fair isle. I saw someone listed something as a fair isle Aran sweater. This is not something. This is somebody who has not done their research. Fair isle is from Scotland. Fair Isle I-S-L-E. It's like island. It's a totally different country. Aaron's sweaters are from Ireland, from the Aaron Islands. So that's my story about Lucky Sevens and Aaron's sweaters and trying something new.
Miranda Black:I do have a question for you Do you like this podcast? Because I don't have a Patreon or anything at the moment. But if you share this podcast with one person, that would really help me out. Or if you write a nice review on Apple. I'm shocked at how much a review bumps my status in the rankings and when you think about it. If I had ads it would take up at least 120 seconds of your time, or the time it takes you to like get your thing and skip it forward. But you could just write a review. I bet you could do it in 15 seconds, not just clicking a star, just doing the stars. I do love them. I have lots of those as well, but it doesn't seem to do anything for my ranking, like how popular Apple says I am.
Miranda Black:It's the written review that really does it. For me, your review is like a raised eyebrow to Apple. It's like a seven with a slash through it. It gets attention. So if you want to follow my Poshmark account, you can easily find me at D growth diva. That's D, e, g, r, o, w, t, h, underscore D, I, v, a. I'm slowly adding items every day. They're quite delicious. My name is Miranda black, the D growth diva. I'll see you next time.
