How to Sell or Donate Your Clothes in the Bay Area

Is your overflowing closet starting to get out of hand? Piles of clothes you haven’t worn in months — or even years — but can’t seem to part with?

Or maybe you’ve already done the hard part and sorted through your closet, but that trash bag of items to get rid of has somehow never left your house.

If you’re looking for advice on how to sell your clothes, donate them or recycle them in the Bay Area — and maybe even make a little bit of cash along the way — we’re here to help. And we know this process isn’t easy, so we talked to the experts who do this every day for a living for pro tips on tackling your closet, and what to do once you’ve finally settled on a giveaway pile.

Read on for Bay Area-specific ideas on:

• How to decide what to purge
• Where to sell your clothes
• How to donate your clothes
• How to recycle your clothes

(And if you’re looking for ideas on how to sell or donate your books, too, we have a guide to that as well.)

Why get rid of your clothes?

Aondrea Maynard runs Artful Organizing SF, a home organizing and styling business. She helps people tackle the worst of their clutter and messes for a fresh start, and she said every person’s reasons and needs are different — and that’s OK.

“Some people are collectors, and they love seeing their beautiful things,” she said. “And some people really find too much visual stimulation to be draining.”

Some have lifestyle constraints that require them to be minimalists, like a tiny apartment or a lack of storage space. Others, she said, are particularly sentimental — but she’s not there to judge.

“Some people, they’re very comfortable having things more tucked away visually,” she said. For others, “if you tuck it away and organize it too far back and too minimally visible, they forget they have it and they buy duplicates.”

For the latter group, one question she likes to ask is: “How do you highlight the things you love, but then let go of the things that are really getting in the way of seeing the things you love?”

Maynard suggested using online organizer Cassandra Aarssen’s “Clutterbug” method, which offers a bug-themed test to find your own organizing style to help you better understand and work with, not against, your natural tendencies.

“There’s not one way that fits each person,” Maynard said. A person’s own organizing style is “very customized, very unique and that’s OK.”

See “the luxury of space” as something you’re giving yourself when you part with an item, she said. Or, you can even work toward a reward — like something that fits into your new life better in that space.

“It’s not that you’re giving up something, but you’re making room for something new in your life,” she said.

How to decide what clothing stays — and what goes

To help her clients get started tackling a looming decluttering project, Maynard uses a method with the acronym SPACE:

• Sort: How much do you use or like each item?
• Purge: What can you part with?
• Accessibility and aesthetics: What goes where and why?
• Containment: How is your stuff contained or organized?
• Evaluate: How is it working?

When going through clothes, Maynard said, if a client doesn’t immediately know a use for the item, it goes in the “maybe” pile.

Then, once they’ve started to get that dopamine hit of getting rid of stuff, they revisit the item, “and with no pressure,” she said. “A lot of it is just talking it through and having someone to brainstorm with.” Consider inviting a friend over to be that sounding board as you go through your closet together.

A big question Maynard finds herself asking, rather than about specific brands or trends, is: What feels good on your body?

Sometimes, people absolutely love how a garment looks — its pattern or colors or cut — but never wear it because they don’t like how it looks on them. Also: Do you see yourself using it again? Or will renting something be a better fit for future events?

And all this is so, so personal, she said: “You want to feel like you’re shopping your own closet, like your favorite shop, your favorite boutiques, where it’s easy to find things that are catching your eye, that spark joy, that feel good.”

Even having a donation bag already on hand is helpful, she said, as you’re doing laundry and flowing through life.

“It’s an organic, continuous process that we outgrow things,” she said. “And then there are new things that represent what we’re moving into next for our lives.”

For clothes in particular, KQED’s own senior editor Carly Severn has her own tactic, called “The Last Chance Saloon,” where you bring all the items you haven’t worn in a while to the front, and you have a week to wear them, or else they go.

Maynard complimented this strategy, “because sometimes you might have an item that you love, but it’s really the past version of yourself.”

The process of getting rid of your clothes is not always easy. Maynard said the best way to remove friction — whether it’s memories, shame, distraction or decision fatigue — is by decluttering with other people.

Much of her job, she said, is reminding clients that they’re “setting themselves up for the version of their life that they desire. We really talk about it like solving a puzzle with friends.”

But now that you know what you’re getting rid of, how do you go about it?

Option 1: Sell your clothes

If you’ve got the time, energy and interest, you can start by trying to sell some of your clothes.

Online options for selling clothes abound, including:

• Depop
• Poshmark
• Mercari
• The Real Real
• ThredUp

You can even try to sell your nicer pieces in person at local consignment stores or chains like Plato’s Closet. If you’re going this route, you’ll have the most success if you price your item in line with the market (look up other similar items for a price range) and include critical details like sizing and any wear and tear.

Here are some of the stores in the Bay Area that could pay you — or offer store credit — for your used clothes:

• Wasteland has several locations around the Bay, including in the Haight. You can get 30% of what the buyers set as selling prices.
• Buffalo Exchange has locations in the Haight and Mission Districts as well as all over the Bay Area. You get 25% of the selling price in cash or 50% in store credit.
• Crossroads on Fillmore, Market and Irving Streets in San Francisco offer in-store and drop-off selling options. You can also request a prepaid bag to sell your clothes by mail or sell higher-value items with consignment.
• 2nd Street has Haight, Stonestown and Berkeley locations, and buys used clothes in-store.
• ReLove in Polk Gulch and Oakland offers 35% of the selling price in cash, 40% in store credit or 35-60% for consignment (reserved for high-end or high-risk items, paid once the item sells).

Remember: All of these locations are likely to require you to be 18 or older and present your ID. They will only accept clothing that’s clean.

Option 2: Donate your clothes

If selling doesn’t seem worth the effort, here in the Bay Area, there are tons of opportunities to donate your used clothing and make sure it stays as clothing and doesn’t end up in the landfill.

Maynard helps her clients give clothes to stores and organizations like Community Thrift, St. Anthony’s, Out of the Closet, Goodwill and The Salvation Army (more info on these below). She said she often helps clients post on local BuyNothing groups, the free section of Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace “to get them into the hands of people that can use them sooner rather than later.”’

Not sure if your clothes are high-quality enough to donate? Rest assured: “Bring us everything,” said Tim O’Neal, president and CEO for Goodwill in the San Francisco Bay Area. “We are happy to take it.”

The Bay Area is a particularly generous market when it comes to people donating clothes, O’Neal said. Previously, clothes you donated here in the Bay Area might get shipped to other markets where fewer people donate.

Despite closing its Oakland location, O’Neal said Goodwill has plans to expand its Bay Area presence and open 80 new stores here in the next decade, outfitted with drive-up donation centers onsite.

A few Bay Area locations to drop off clothing donations (in general, these centers prefer clean clothing and textiles, but are more flexible than buyers in what they accept):

• Community Thrift Store in San Francisco’s Mission District takes donations almost every day, and has a thorough list of what you can and cannot donate
• St. Anthony’s accepts donations at its Golden Gate Avenue location in San Francisco or via mail
• Out of the Closet accepts in-store donations at its San Francisco and East Bay locations, as well as large item pickup if needed
• Goodwill has dozens of locations all over the Bay Area, and many accept donations (check this list to verify)
• The Salvation Army has donation drop-off sites all over the Bay Area

You could also consider getting your friends in on the act and organizing — even hosting — an in-person clothing swap party. You could even start one for your workplace: Here at KQED, we’re lucky to even have a periodic clothing exchange, which helps motivate many of us to finally part with that too-small jacket or dress we’ll never wear again.

Option 3: Recycle your clothes

If your clothes can’t be resold at all — for example, if they’re stained or broken beyond repair — Goodwill can still send them elsewhere to be recycled back to their fibers to be used in other industries, O’Neal said.

“If we can’t use it, we can find a way to recycle it or repurpose it,” he said. Just don’t bring them any hazardous materials, he stressed.

Other groups, like The Salvation Army in San Francisco, also take textile donations for recycling. And if you’re cleaning out your closet and stumble upon other, non-clothing items to get rid of, most donation centers will take those, too.

How to recycle your clothes at:

• The Salvation Army: Drop off clothes at its Bay Area locations or schedule a home pickup
• H&M: With locations all over the Bay Area, you can drop off clean clothes in donation bins.
• Ridwell: This subscription service recycler will also take your textiles, but you have to pay a fee.

Check out this county-run list for even more locations in the Bay Area (or this one for San Francisco) that accept clothing to recycle, including retailers accepting specific items like denim and socks.

Just remember: Textiles are hard to recycle, so if you want to minimize waste, you may try to repair, repurpose, sell or donate your clothes before recycling them.