Disco

It’s been a minute since I wrote about a brand, and this week I want to highlight Disco.

Disco was founded by Alina Liu, who realized during a moving process how much excess clothing she had accumulated over time. Growing up in Massachusetts, with parents who immigrated from China during the 1980s, Alina’s family is familiar with repurposing for practical means. She understood the importance of minimizing waste as much as possible, and the value of investing in what we already have.

After learning how much more efficient circular economies can be, benefiting the seller, the buyer, and the environment, Alina was inspired to create a solution that allows people to buy secondhand in a seamless way. She created Disco.

Disco is a tool to search the secondhand internet. You can use the product by searching on their website or using the Chrome extension. The extension enables a sidebar when you search a clothing site, giving you secondhand options and their prices. The process is clean and makes it easy to shop your favorite stores while making an individual choice to reduce your own waste.

These days there are companies of all sizes doing the work to combat climate change. Sometimes it feels like there’s almost nothing an individual can do to make a difference. But there are solutions and many individual actions equal the collective one.

By creating a tool that gives shoppers a simple way of exploring secondhand options, Disco introduces a new system for how we think about online shopping in general.

At least for me, when I online shop, my mindset is that I’m buying something new. This isn’t the healthiest place to be, mentally. Shopping for clothes should be about exploring pieces that shape one’s sense of style and identity. It should be about discovery.

It’s not about new as in “brand new”, it’s about furthering new self-expression.

Disco gives us no option but to wonder why we’re shopping in a particular way, and a new path to better habits and curing our obsession with “new” over good.