Love You More Podcast
Love You More Podcast
Ep 58: Creating Your Mindful Closet with Guest Dacy Gillespie
April 1, 2025
Love You More
Ep 58: Creating Your Mindful Closet with Guest Dacy Gillespie
Episode summary:
In this episode, Jen is joined by personal stylist Dacy Gillespie, who shares her journey from burnout in the nonprofit world to building a career around her lifelong love of fashion. What started as a one-year break has turned into twelve years of helping other women through her business, Mindful Closet. Dacy opens up about how she defines self-care—setting up her life to avoid burnout. She walks listeners through her personal styling process, which includes an intake questionnaire, curated Pinterest boards, closet edits, shopping tutorials, and integration sessions designed to help clients find what truly feels like them.
Throughout the conversation, Dacy emphasizes the emotional side of fashion, particularly for women navigating years of societal messaging about beauty and body image. She sees herself as a guide, someone who helps clients uncover their own preferences rather than telling them what to wear. Jen and Dacy also talk about the power of social media and how curating your feed to reflect a diversity of bodies can shift how you see yourself. By showcasing real people of all shapes and sizes, Dacy aims to normalize the beauty of difference and encourage people to feel confident in clothes that reflect who they are.
More about Dacy:
After years in high-stress careers that clashed with her sensitive, introverted nature, Dacy founded Mindful Closet in 2013 to pursue a more emotionally sustainable life. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Real Simple, The Strategist, and Lifehacker, and she’s a frequent podcast guest. She lives in St. Louis with her husband and two kids.
Favorite Quotes:
“I wanna hear what their relationship to their body and their clothes has been over the course of their life. I wanna hear what messages they got from their mother, their grandmother, their high-school friends…” - Dacy
"I do think there is a lack of permission to choose what works for you as opposed to taking care of everyone around you” - Dacy
"If you can’t become more familiar with a diversity of bodies it’s going to be really hard for you to be able to feel good in your clothes.”- Dacy
“I’m really scared that as a society we are going to forget what a woman without modifications looks like.” - Dacy
Resources:
Mindful Closet Website
Unflattering- Dacy’s Substack
Dacy’s Instagram
Substack
Jennifer's Instagram
McDaniel Nutrition Therapy Instagram
McDaniel Nutrition Therapy Website
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SPEAKER_01:Are you tired of the constant struggle of coming up with what's for breakfast, lunch, or dinner? Do you find yourself overwhelmed by conflicting nutrition advice? Say goodbye to the guesswork and frustration because our dietitians at McDaniel Nutrition have the perfect meal planning service for you. These custom meal plans are meticulously crafted in collaboration with you and our dietitians. And here's what you can expect from this service, a personalized assessment. We need to start with what you care about, your health goals, dietary restrictions, lifestyle factors, who you live with. Those plans will then be customized to you. Say goodbye to the one size fits all meal plans that you can find generated by AI or online. These are customized to you and your individual goals. You will have expert guidance because your registered dietitian is with you every single week through the process, making sure that your plan is perfect for you. And you'll have access to our convenient online platform where you can make changes to your meal plans at any point that you'd like. Results that you can see and feel our clients are so satisfied with these plans that they keep asking for more and wanting us to create them week after week. Ready to take the first step towards this customized meal plan? Contact us now to get started. Your taste buds and body will thank you. Welcome to the Love You More podcast. I am your host, Jennifer McDaniel, and today we have a local guest, a local St. Louisan, Daisy Gillespie. Daisy is a weight-inclusive, anti-diet personal stylist who helps her clients reject fashion rules and ideal standards of beauty imposed by the patriarchy, white supremacism, and capitalism so they can uncover their authentic style. Through their work building a functional wardrobe, Daisy's clients make a mindset shift from thinking they need to wear what's flattering to unapologetically taking up space in the world. After a lifetime of jobs and high-stress careers that didn't suit her highly sensitive introverted personality, which I feel deeply, Daisy started Mindful Closet in 2013 in an attempt to create a more emotionally sustainable lifestyle. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Real Simple, New York Magazine's The Strategist, and Lifehacker, and she is a frequent podcast guest. Daisy lives with her husband and two boys in St. Louis, Missouri. Daisy, it's so lovely to have you here. I'm
SPEAKER_00:happy to be here. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we were just talking because Daisy and I have both been in a household full of kids home from school in a very snow-filled St. Louis. So we're really grateful to have all kids back at school today so we can do this without anybody pounding on our door.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, absolutely. It's just lovely to have have some silence.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, really. I hope you don't mind me asking you this question because you posted it on social media the other day. So I have to follow up. What happened with Fortnite? Did you decide to bring Fortnite into your house?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So interesting. Yes. So I am a really, I mean, I think, I don't know if this is part of being a highly sensitive person, but, you know, I really think very deeply about things and maybe even too much. Like I probably overthink a lot of things, but yeah, I mean, we have a tenure old whose friends have been playing fortnight for for a few years some of them um of course the game is rated 13 and up um and i don't like that there is gun violence in it in the game that's my main concern with it and then also my concern is that my son has ADHD and, you know, video games are created to be just to hook you in and kind of, you know, just get you hooked. So we decided to give it a try and we limit it to one hour a day. And it's been a few weeks and so far it's been going okay. My husband has kind of like, we've both kind of like sat with him while he played and yeah, it's, you know, with parenting I think you just, some things you have to give a little bit on and some things you have to hold the line on. And that's just kind of where we landed on this one. I don't think there's any right answer.
SPEAKER_01:No, no, there never is. It's just whatever comes up and what feels right for your family and you can always change your mind, right? I mean, we, my oldest also requested that this year and we just got a PS5 for the first time for Christmas, for holiday. And Um, yeah, I will say, uh, we absolutely let him play too long on it at times. And especially over the days in which we've had these snow days, we've really, he's really had some fun with it. I do love the fact that he's constantly talking out loud with another person, you know, compared to being down in a room by himself, you know, um, there just seems to be like camaraderie and, um, yeah, that part I was pleasantly surprised, um, with that piece of things, but you know, you have, you have a younger child too. And I think that was the other part with us. We were like, okay, well, if you get to have this, you know, I don't really want the other boys involved and I tried to hold that line and then you know they're so curious and they want to know and you just can't I can't be there at all times so the other ones have definitely snuck in and kind of watched and I've watched too and you know yes absolutely there's the guns and stuff that we don't care for I will say it doesn't seem to be quite as violent as I was maybe expecting it to be you know um and a bit more kind of just like like curious and strategic. And yeah, so anyway, I just, yeah, I was curious how that landed for you, Daisy.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's tough.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it absolutely is. But so I always start with this question for our guests, what is just to hear a little bit about what self-care, you know, looks like for you. That
SPEAKER_00:is like the lifelong thing. you know, thing to figure out. Right. But actually I think I've done a lot of good work. I mean, for me, self-care is kind of, you know, when you were reading my bio, it was kind of reminding me of that. Like really for me, self-care is like setting up my life in a way that is not going to burn me out pretty much. And so for me, I'm extremely lucky and privileged and I am grateful for the situation that I have in which I don't work a full eight hours a day. I mean, I really have learned that even when I was working in an office, that my kind of sustained mental capacity, you know, I can go for a few hours. And then at that point, the work that I'm doing is not good. And when I was in an office, it would be kind of like, okay, I'll do some busy work, you know, because I still have to be here. But that for me is the biggest piece of self-care. And especially I'll add in like when you are a parent, for me having an hour or so to myself before they get home from school, you know, kind of in between work and kids being home is again, something I know I'm very lucky to have, but it really is self-care.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, I love that. I love kind of the transition time of being able to just have a minute before you move into a different mode. You know, how do you, how do you kind of, what does it feel like? What does it look like when you can tell that you're needing more of that time? Like you kind of mentioned, you know, that you've got this like bandwidth and then it sort of ends. What are some of those signals for you?
SPEAKER_00:Do you mean in terms of like overall life stuff when I start to get close to burnout or like within a day?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, within a day, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah,
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I'll just truly get to the point where I'm like, I can't think straight. You know what I mean? I'm trying to solve this problem and the solution is not coming. Or if I'm writing, you know, I do a lot of writing that, you know, I'm just stuck and things are not going anywhere. And at that point, it's just not worth it to try and push because I'll only exhaust myself further and nothing good will come out of it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. So it's very evident for you in your work. That's kind of where it really shows up. Yeah, yeah. For sure. Maybe we could start with the transition. You were in this different type of job that was requiring more from you than you were wanting, and then you transitioned into your business that you have now. Can you tell us a little bit about how that unfolded?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I feel like I'm, you know, I always feel when I speak about my own privilege, I always I feel guilty, you know, I'll be honest, you know, because I know there are so many parents out there and so many just people listening who don't have as many options as I have. So I just always really want to acknowledge that.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And so, yeah, I was working at a nonprofit. And if you've ever worked at a nonprofit, you know that you're doing three people's jobs for half of one person's pay and working a lot. And really for at least a year or two had been kind of considering a career change and really didn't know what I would do. And so I really had been talking about this with my therapist for months and months. And I've always loved fashion and clothes. But truly, I just never thought I was cool enough to work in fashion. Do you know what I mean? It just felt like a space that I couldn't fit in. I couldn't belong. And so my therapist, finally, one day she asked this question that kind of unlocked everything for me. And she said, what is it that people come to you for help with? And that had kind of always been something that people knew about me. It was a piece of my identity that I loved clothes and that, you know, you would come to me with a question about what to wear or help clean out your closet or whatever. And so that idea, just the thought that like other people maybe believed in me about this, maybe I could, have that belief in myself was really the pivot point. And then again, I was lucky enough. I'm married to a wonderful person and he said, let's take a year. Why don't you start a business and take a year and see how it goes? And I did. And this is 12 years later.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's wonderful. And I It sounds like you also have a very good therapist.
SPEAKER_00:It's important. Yeah, it's important.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, to spark that question and to kind of get the mind. Yeah, curious about that. piece to sort of send you off in this trajectory. And yeah, I also, regarding the privilege and, you know, even seeing yourself in this role as a stylist, but then now being able to offer it to others, you know, in a way in which making it accessible, you know, how does that look like with what you do at Mindful Closet and making it available to people who, you know, maybe we wouldn't think, oh, I couldn't afford to have a personal stylist.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's something I think about all the time. And I'll just say upfront that since 2020, I've donated 10% of profits to Jamaa Birth Village, which is a local St. Louis midwifery clinic for Black women, because you probably know that the maternal death rate for Black women is so much higher than anyone else. And that having had two babies and kind of going through that experience, I just think that support in that area is so, so important. So that's one piece, you know, and definitely my services are expensive. Like if I were not me, and I was considering this, I don't know if I'd be able to spend the amount of money. But what I do is I have so many resources that I get constant feedback on from people saying how, how helpful they are. So, you know, I have a sub stack newsletter with, you know, any of the articles that I write with like very concrete advice about how to handle a certain situation. Those are always free. I have free downloads about how to create a capsule wardrobe and how to oh gosh, I don't even know how to pack for travel, you know? And on my Instagram, I'm, you know, I just, I give away a lot of, a lot of free advice. And so that for me is a way in which there are options, like a breadth of options from free to more expensive.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, that's fantastic. And thank you for doing what you're doing in terms of donating a large percentage of what you do. That's fabulous. And I know that those I'm curious about how what you have done has changed in terms of how you work mostly with women. Is this 100% women that come through? You don't ever work with men. So when you first got started and you had that year that you and your husband were just like, let's play around with this and see what happens. How has Mindful Closet evolved? How have you worked with women? How has that changed?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, so yeah, so much. Well, initially I was really open to working with anyone and I worked with men, but I really realized pretty quickly that the piece of this whole kind of styling business that is the most really interesting to me. And I think makes the most impact is kind of the emotional piece and the mind, the mindset piece that I can help people shift. And what that is, is that I couldn't, I couldn't believe that, you know, woman after woman after woman that I worked with, everyone had the same issue. Like everyone had the same issue and it didn't matter what their body looked like, but everyone thought their body was wrong. And so when you think that about your body, when you think that it shouldn't be the way it is, that it should be the way it was in the past, or it should be some standard that we've seen on social media or TV. when you feel that way about your body, you're not able to move forward with your style. You are holding onto clothes that don't fit. You are not allowing yourself to buy clothes in the size that does fit. And that's what I saw over and over. And so that really led me to kind of educate myself on body image, on intuitive eating, on health at every size. And all of those things have just kind of contributed bits and pieces to the way that I approach this now.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so what might that look like? You know, you have the woman who comes in and, you know, opens up with something like that. Well, I'm so, you know, frustrated. Like I, you know, I used to be able to wear this size and now I just kind of, I don't know what to do with all those clothes. Should I just like keep them? Should I throw them away? I mean, I, in our practice, we have lots of conversations like that as well. You know, now we've got a lot of weight loss medications out there too, which is kind of shifting things around. So yeah, what is, how do you even get started with those conversations?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, the, The way I think to get started is to name and acknowledge why you believe that, right? I spend my entire first session with clients. We don't really get into clothing specifics, but I want to hear what their relationship to their body and their clothes has been over the course of their life. I want to hear what messages they got from their mother, from their grandmother, from their high school friends, you know, because I want, when we get to that point of them saying, well, these clothes don't fit, but I don't want to get rid of them because maybe I'll fit back into them. I want to be able to refer back to the conversation where we said, oh, that's right. I got, that's my mom. That's what my mom said to me. And I Am I choosing to believe the same thing that she believes or am I choosing to kind of choose my own way of being in the world? And so having that foundation of knowing where those influences came from, naming them, deciding whether you want to accept them or not, that comes into play when we edit your closet or when we go shopping.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I love that so much, Daisy. I feel like that's something that I've just recently kind of stumbled upon in terms of having the belief that our thoughts are not ours, you know, for the most part, that thoughts around any kind of diet culture related thing. You know, when we were born, we had, you know, we had this perfectly empty, perfect thing, perfect baby with nothing other than just curiosity. And then over time, you know, depending upon where we landed and what family we were into, born into, or what college we went to and who our roommates were, like over time, all of these, you know, thoughts put in us about how we should think about something. And so just to be able to separate, you know, the fact that that is just a thought that someone else is sort of, or some cult Right, yeah. you know uh probably late 60s and just feeling like she just didn't know how to eat and you know i felt like that was something that we i really wanted to go deeply with her about like your your wise self does know how to eat you know um so i just really appreciate you know um that you have that you spend a whole first session unpacking that with someone. And yeah, do you have any just kind of cool stories from a first session like that? Like what someone, you know, how they feel differently after they leave your...
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I have so many. The first one that comes to mind, though, is I also have a group. So I do one-on-one work. And then one of my lower price options is group work. And I just had someone who she has been feeling so lost. Like you said, like she doesn't know what she... what she likes and I would say probably a similar age range. And I posed this question or part of what I teach in the group is to create a really specific shopping list. Like this is after you've defined your style, this is after you've edited your wardrobe, but you need to like be very concrete on what you're specifically looking for, because that's the issue when we get into shopping and over shopping, it's because you're not specific enough about what you really need. And so she asked me the question, she said, is that really possible? Is it really possible to like put a specific thing on a list and then actually find it? And I was like, yeah. And she said, I've just always, she's like, I've never, I've always settled in one way or another. And then she went away for a couple of days and then she came back and she said, I realized that that is a connection to how I've never been able to ask for exactly what I need in life. And so like the act of giving her permission to say specifically what piece of clothing that she wanted and to hold out for it all, the fit, the comfort, the style, all of those pieces to be there, she had this big shift where she's like, yeah, I've never, I've always settled basically.
SPEAKER_02:Wow.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, how incredibly empowering to be able to see other, other ways, you know, to see other ways to live that out. And then, once you know something is true, you can't unknow that. So it's kind of like the ability to continue to show up in that way. And I'm sure that that transfers outside of choosing her wardrobe to other areas in life as well. So what beautiful work.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, I love it. I have had clients leave their jobs after we work together. I really, you know, I do think there's, especially being conditioned as women in our culture, I do think that there is a lack of permission to choose things. what works for you as opposed to taking care of everyone around you. And so the way that I look at what I do is it's just one entry point. I see the way that you work with people as another entry point and they're all entry points into listening to that inner voice, right? And they're all practice in doing that. And so whether you're working on knowing what you want to eat or knowing what you want to wear or knowing how you want to move your body, those are all ways that you're getting to know that true essence, like you said.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. No, that's wonderful. How do, how have a lot of your clients found you? Oh,
SPEAKER_00:that's such a good question. And I'm, it's, it's shifted back and forth kind of over time. I have had most of my clients, well, currently they're mostly coming from just a search engine, optimization. So Google pretty much. Yeah. And yeah, I know. I know. I mean, I definitely, that's definitely something I've worked on. But then I also get clients through Instagram. I get clients through Substack. I've had a couple people come through TikTok, although that is kind of, you know, who knows what's going on over there anymore. But and then I have definitely had, you know, people Referrals. One thing that's been happening recently is that I have had several husbands get in touch with me and say, you know, this has been always been frustrating for my wife. And I looked and I found your website and it seems like something that she would be interested in. And I've just found that like really touching that there are people who are really seeing someone's discomfort and wanting to help them with that. And, you know, on the one hand, I don't actually don't do gift certificates at all because I did do them early on. And, you know, it's not always a welcome gift. Someone says like, here's someone to help you with your clothes. And you think to yourself, well, is there something wrong with my clothes? And so I don't do that anymore. So basically my response to these people is, you know, yeah, I'd love to work with her and let's, you know, let's talk to her about it, you know, but I don't want this to be something that's like sprung on someone.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But oh my gosh, how lovely is that? Because I can just envision, you know, we're in the closet and we, who is the person there, you know, be like, okay, how does this look on me? They never know. You know, it's like always a comedian joke. How do we answer this question? So I just, that's so, so lovely. And, but the way, like, I feel like any, if some partner brought this to my, you to my attention. And I went to your site and I saw your vibe and who you were, anything that I was like, oh, he's trying to get me, you know, that would just disappear.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, I do really try and convey, you know, everywhere that this is not about me telling you what to do. This is not about me, you know, diagnosing your body as some kind of fruit and then telling you what is the most flattering for your body. This is really, I see myself as a guide to helping you uncover Yeah. Yeah, I
SPEAKER_01:know. That's wonderful. And I, you know, I think about just kind of going back to style and, you know, how we tend to get in. I don't know. I just sort of feel like personally that like my style is sort of just very slowly changing. shaped over time but nothing nothing grand nothing grandiose you know still kind of wear the same things to some degree do do you find that when women come and work with you that they really sort of continue down the road of the same stuff or do they do you see a lot of like oh my gosh she's wearing completely different things and expressing a different side of her
SPEAKER_00:yeah i see both i mean when you asked me the question before kind of about what, you know, I've seen with clients, how it's changed them. You know, another, another example that had come to mind was a woman who was in a larger body and she'd always been kind of taught by her mother to dress very conservatively and in like very tailored lines because like, you don't want to look bigger than you are and you don't want to call any attention to yourself. And as we worked together, I mean, from the start, she was, And it's just crazy. Like, cause like you said, it's there, it's there. But she loves like really Bohemian clothes. Like she loves linen and things that flow in the wind. And, you know, once we found that out, it was like she was not going back and, and yeah, she would, you would look at her and see a different person than, than you had seen before. I will say for most people, it's not that big of a shift, but that was a fun one.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, totally. No, that's great. After people work with you, do you kind of notice, I'm just kind of, I'm wondering how, we don't go back into old practices. You know, I think like whether it's looking at certain things on Instagram or, you know, going to a certain place for fashion ideas, like it feels like there should be some, not things that are off, you know, we don't do this anymore, but to sort of protect ourselves from this, you know, just curious about like what that, how that
SPEAKER_00:might work. Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think we all need to curate our feeds very intentionally, our social media. I think any time you see an image that makes you feel bad about yourself, you should immediately unfollow. I also think it's really important. A lot of the work that I do with clients is on Pinterest. And on Pinterest, it's really important to make sure that you're seeing a diversity of bodies. Because as in most media, most of the images you're going to see are of then white women, then tall white women. And if that's not you, it's going to be very hard to make the connection between what that person's wearing and what you could wear. And I see people shut themselves down all the time because they say, They might say, oh, I like that outfit, but I can never wear that. Or I love that outfit, but it wouldn't look good on me. And so what we have to do is we kind of ignore that at first. And I really tell people to try and turn off that thinking brain and just go with like a gut instinct about the clothes. Like, let's try not to look at the body. Let's try and look at just the clothes. And we'll get a good sense of their style from that. But once we've done that, that bit of work and we have at least a phrase or some keywords we can work with about their style, then we have to start adding a diversity of bodies. And Pinterest has started to make some progress in this area. They've got a body type search filter now where you can choose a bigger body for your results when you're searching. And also it's really important, like personally, I, every few pins, I have to make sure to pin someone in a bigger body or else Pinterest is going to continue to feed me bodies that don't look like mine even. And I'm, you know, I'm, I have lots of, of thin privilege, but it's really, really important because I think just, and I'm, my previous career was in classical music. And I think about this concept of like familiarity, which is like, we all know Beethoven's music and we all know Mozart's music. And I, it's familiar to us. But if you heard a piece of classical music that was written 10 years ago, it would sound so weird to you because you haven't heard it for years and years and years. And it's the same with images. All we've seen all of our lives, you know, especially those of us who are millennials, elder millennials, you know, all we've seen are, you know, Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie. And, you know, even in the age of social media, you know, there's a prevalence for that, for these ideal bodies that truly are such a small percentage of what we all actually look like. And if you can't become more familiar with a diversity of bodies, it's going to be really hard for you to be able to feel good in your clothes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, that's so beautiful. And it just makes me think a lot of, you know, some of the younger women that come into this practice, whether they're youth athletes or they're, you know, women who have some disordered eating patterns and thinking about how much time they're spending on social media and the images that they're seeing over and over again. And you know, just maybe some more conversation around what, what does your, what do your Instagram or TikTok or social media feeds look like? I mean, And getting curious about ways that they might be able to shake that up and or not spend so much time, but that can be trickier, you know?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, it's really, really tough because now not only, you know, at least Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie were human,
SPEAKER_02:you
SPEAKER_00:know, and when we would see them, there weren't so many, you know, ways to modify their body in images, but now you can't even trust that what you're seeing on social media is that person's body you know what I mean it could have been modified in so many ways that yeah I think it's really hard and honestly this is such a huge topic and you know it's it's a road we shouldn't go down right now but it is just I'm really scared that as a society we're going to forget what a woman without modifications looks like
SPEAKER_02:yeah
SPEAKER_01:yeah yeah I um I heard from a therapist the other day something just as an act to do which I found so brilliant which was to encourage my clients to create a separate Instagram account where it's only things that really feel like just totally comforting and lovely and warm, like a bunch of animal videos or nature videos. And that's only what those, you know, Instagram accounts are made up of and to have a separate, separate one, you know, and I'm always just encouraging people. you know, my clients just to check in with themselves, how they feel when they get off of it, you know, feeling better, feeling better now that you've spent some time on that. Are you feeling worse? Are you in comparison mode? Like what's happening? You know? So anyway, I just thought that was kind of an interesting suggestion by the therapist because we can't always tell, you know, uh, 17-year-old or a college kid to like get off social, but maybe we can teach them to create something and just to sort of a sense of balance there for themselves, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I like
SPEAKER_01:that. So, you know, in terms of, you've kind of alluded to this a little bit throughout our conversation, but, you know, let's just say a client comes to you, you know, the the woman whose husband so wisely, you know, said you should check out Daisy's work. Can you sort of walk us through what it looks like to have a session with you or multiple sessions with you over time?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, as I mentioned, well, I guess I'll back up a little bit. You know, one thing that I've found people get a lot out of before we've even met and I do everything remotely. So, you know, we're meeting on zoom, but I send this long intake questionnaire with lots of questions about more about how you want to feel almost than how you want to look. And I get feedback from people that they have awarenesses that they didn't have before just by going through that and answering those questions. And then a piece of that work is that pre-work is creating a Pinterest board kind of in the way that I mentioned before, where we're really trying to focus on the clothes and not censoring yourself based on what you think would look good on you. And so when we first meet, that's that first session that I mentioned earlier, I call it your style story. And so we kind of, we really go back. It's amazing how many people did feel free to wear whatever they wanted as children. And then, like you said, like gradually the kind of restrictions get placed on them more and more and more. But yeah, we go back to childhood. We talk about all of that. And then at the end of that session, we will take a look at their Pinterest board and kind of come up with some words or phrases to really describe their style that they can just have it as a guide. In the second session, when I work with them, we do a closet edit. And we're really working to make sure that everything they have in their closet, or at least everything that's front and center, fits today and that they like and that they can wear today. You know, we were talking earlier about how that's hard for some people, you know, to move out the clothes that no longer fit. And, you know, it's OK to hold on to them for a while if you want. I mean, that can be a grieving process and it can take time. But my biggest piece of advice is just don't have it hanging in your closet because you are going to see that stuff every day when you get dressed and it's just not helpful. In the third session, I do a shopping tutorial. And so basically I'm sharing my screen on Zoom and taking the client through the process that I use for shopping. I shop for all my clients online, obviously. And so I'm kind of just trying to teach them a very detailed, specific way of shopping as opposed to just saying, well, I need clothes for work. Let me go online and look for clothes for work. And you have the entire internet. That's too overwhelming. You really have to kind of filter things down. At that point, then I'll do some personal shopping for a client. I will usually... choose 40 or 50 items for them to try. They order them. We have a joint try on session where they're trying on the clothes and I'm kind of that, hopefully I'm a grounding presence for them and reminding them of what's important, you know, in these, you know, when you're trying on things. And yeah, and then we have an integration session, a last session where we kind of talked about where we started and where we are and how to kind of continue that going forward.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's so beautiful. Your work is so beautiful, Daisy. I just love having you as a resource out in this world. Just out of curiosity, these stores and places, you know, like you just said, I mean, clothes for work. Oh my gosh, where to go? Have you found stores, brands that just do a very good job falling in line with your value system that you like to recommend or that you shop for, or you use yourself for yourself.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, I mean, I have a spreadsheet of retailers that I use when I'm shopping for clients and it has 250 retailers on it. And so, and that spreadsheet is sorted by price range and by size range and by style. And so for every client, there's going to be a different assortment of retailers that will be better for them, you know, based on all those requirements. There are a couple that I just love to recommend because I like the way you asked that, that they align with my value One is a universal standard. And so this is a company, this is a big company. You know, this is not like a little private or like a little small retailer. It's a big company. And they are one of the only brands in the world to have every item in size double zero to 40. And so, yeah. And their website is great because it shows the clothes on models of all sizes. That's really important, I find. You know, it's really hard to buy something in a size 18 when the model who's showing it is a size 2. You know, it's going to look different on you. And there's no avoiding that. And it's hard not to have that expectation. So Universal Standard is one. And then a really small brand that I love is called Elizabeth Suzanne, and she's based in Nashville and similarly has a wide range of sizes. But the way this woman has built her business is so ethical from like the way she treats the people who work for her to, you know, just everything she does. And she's very transparent about all of it. It's just a really great company.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's awesome. No, that's great. I'm going to have to check her out. That's where I'm from, so I love hearing Nashville come out. And tell us a little bit about how you found your own style. Do you feel like your style... has evolved a lot over time or do you find that you just really gravitate towards I haven't I haven't like peeled through all your subs decks because I know you take lots of photos and kind of share some of your favorite outfits and that sort of thing but like just kind of curious personal preferences
SPEAKER_00:yeah I'm smiling because I do a lot of podcast interviews and I don't think maybe one other person has asked me this so this is fun yeah my style has had lots of shifts over my life again I call that like your style story like what are the phases I've always I always loved clothes and fashion. When I was little, I actually grew up in Mobile, Alabama, and it was very Southern the way that the cool kids dressed. And I didn't have any of that. My parents didn't have a lot of money. And so I kind of always felt like on the. outer circles of, you know,
SPEAKER_02:the
SPEAKER_00:group with the guest jeans and the tree thorns and the, all that stuff. Yeah. So when I got to high school, I kind of started rejecting all that. It was the nineties and I went like full grunge. Actually, as I'm talking, a lot of my style phases have been resistance to what was around me. Yeah. And then, yeah, in college, again, kind of in contrast to what a lot of college kids were doing, I just, I dressed up a lot every day. So that was different. And then in my twenties, I really started thrifting a lot and really started just really going a little bit more out there with my outfits and experimenting a lot. I would really truly like look at runway shows and try and recreate some of those looks with stuff that I could find. And that was fun. And then that became too much effort and too much work. And then, you know, I wanted to, I wanted everything to be easy. And so that was my minimalist phase where I was just only wearing neutrals and linen and I loved it. I felt great. And then in the last year or so, I've been craving color. So now I'm injecting some color into that minimalist wardrobe.
SPEAKER_01:That's so cool. I just like, yeah, if you asked me that I wouldn't have nowhere to start. Clearly, you've got the eye and the mindset for all of this. You know, I'm also really curious about like, I it's, you know, it's just so interesting as kids, like my husband and I grew up in very different types of families and, you know, he grew up where if you were going somewhere and traveling on the airplane, like you needed to look nice and you needed to wear whatever. And, you know, and now, you know, our kids just wear whatever the heck they, you know, want to wear. I don't think we, the boys do not own a pair of jeans. It's only comfortable stuff, but like, you know, what's that like in your house? Do the boys just kind of just do whatever they want? And you're like, Absolutely. Or how does it look to be a parent and a stylist?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, another really great question that I don't get asked very often. But yes, I had a very clear... conception of how i wanted uh my children to dress and that was basically like if you can picture like a little french boy in the countryside that's like how i wanted them to dress um and then it became very apparent i'd say when my older was three or four definitely by kindergarten he had very strong opinions about what he wanted to wear and what he wanted to wear was name brand athletic gear and you know under armor and uh whatever adidas all of it and That is what he has wanted to wear. I very, very rarely... make him wear anything other than that. You know? I mean, I can think of like one or two occasions where I've had him put on a pair of pants, but yeah, he's wearing, he's wearing track pants or shorts and you know, as we call them plastic shirt, you know, one of those athletic shirts every day.
SPEAKER_01:Totally. Yeah. I'll never forget when my oldest son came out and like a tank top of Spider-Man at the age of like five.
SPEAKER_00:I was like, Whoa. Yeah. It's tough because it's, It's tough because on the one hand, when they're young, you're in control of the clothes they have available to them, right? And so you can kind of control that, but you can't control what they see out in the world and they see things that they want. And yeah, I mean, because... Again, kind of a reaction to the way I grew up because I never had kind of the name brand stuff or whatever. If there's something they ask for, especially clothing wise, I always try. I will try first to find it secondhand, but I'll pretty much always get that for them because I just want them to feel comfortable. good in their clothes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, that's really a lovely perspective because I will say my older two boys have never really paid much attention to that. But my youngest one who also has a lot of sensory things with clothes always has required that. And I've I've been judgmental of it, you know, I've totally been judgmental of it and try to be like, we can't always have that, you know, and those are, you know, but we have found that Kohl's has a lot of the options for a more affordable price point. So, and I, I'm learning now, like, you know, for, for also, he also has ADHD and some other things. And so it's kind of like, okay, whatever helps you to feel good in your own skin, you know, I'm, yeah. So I just love hearing you say that, you know, as a former thrifter.
SPEAKER_00:Oh yeah. I thrift like 99% of their stuff, especially kids clothes. You just got to think of how quickly kids grow out of things. So the amount of stuff that's out there, like I find brand new, all those name brand things secondhand, or I'll do Poshmark, you know, if there's something specific.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, that's great. Maybe you have any success stories for me. So for any of us who do have kids with sensory and text, you know, texture stuff, Like, have you talked to a lot of adults who used to have those things and now that they don't? Like, do they grow
SPEAKER_00:out of this? No, no, they don't. No, they don't. I'm sorry to tell you. No, they still have them. And it's a challenge. You know, it really is a challenge. But those are the people for whom feel comfortable. you know, I always talk about like, what's the priority in your clothing? Like, is it how you appear to other people? Is it how you feel in your clothing? And for those people, the priority is how the clothing feels to the touch. And that is like absolutely the most important thing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I caught that. I really loved that when you first started talking about just your, for your initial questionnaire. And I, I would love to see that initial questionnaire too. Is that, is that available online or do you have to just kind of sign up and get that? You kind of have to sign up to be a client
SPEAKER_00:first. Yeah. I just, I just send it to clients, but it's not a bad idea to maybe put in a sub stack post or something someday. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:that would be really neat. I just, I think that, you know, for them to be, have some aha moments by filling that out. And then also, you know, you wanting them to know how they want to feel versus how they want to look. I mean, obviously both might matter, you know, but the feeling part is, you know, where it's at, I think in both of our lines of work.
SPEAKER_02:So,
SPEAKER_01:oh, it was, So wonderful getting the chance to just hear your perspective and learn about your work, Daisy. So tell us where people can find all of your information in case they would like to keep up with you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, for sure. So I am, my website is mindfulcloset.com and I'm at mindfulcloset on all social media. And then my sub stack is daisygillespie.substack.com and my sub stack is called unflattering.
SPEAKER_01:Wonderful. Thanks so much, Stacey.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much for having me. That was a super fun conversation. Thank
SPEAKER_01:you. It was such a pleasure.