Hi all, and happy Wednesday!

Fun fact - I live in the most locked-down jurisdiction in North America for the pandemic - and we've just been locked down again! So thank you Angie for giving me something to sink my analytical brain into this a.m. rather than fretting!

Inspired by today's blog post, I decided to analyse my 2021 shopping to determine what approaches to shopping were successful for me. I'm putting my big learning here at the top, and then the detail is further down for any of the other analytics-nerds

Big Learning

I need to be my own authority, and in fact, most of the time I am! Despite my lists and plans, the vast majority of my purchases included either an emotional element, or a self-identified (vs. following someone else's advice) want or need and ALL OF THESE WERE SUCCESSFUL. Yay me, and will be applying this heartily in 2022 (in fact, this is a big theme for 2022 in general for me - more on that another time I'm sure).

Additionally, since I don't lead with my emotions, I can really trust them when the show up - it's actually my tendency to rationalize that needs to be kept in check.

In the Finds, I'm showing some of the purchases that I believe where right in the center of the success Venn diagram - organized emotional purchases driven by a self-identified need. However, emotional purchases inspired by an influencer, or non-emotional purchases inspired by a self-identified need, also worked this year.

Ok now skip the rest unless you want to see just how over-thinky I can get

Method
I went through my Finds and cross-tabulated them based on the following criteria:

1. Success of the purchase: Success/Fail/Undecided
2. Process that drove the purchase: Organized but Not Emotional and a self-identified need, Organized but Not Emotional and purchased because of a capsule or influencer, and then the same for Emotional but not Organized, and Organized Emotional (so 6 categories there in total).

Here is what I've learned:
What works (for me)
- ALL of my self-identified purchases were successes. In other words, if I identified a need and then went to fill it, it didn't really matter whether I followed some organized process, my emotions, or a combination - the purchase worked.
- ALL my emotional purchases were successes. In other words, whether I started with some vague notion of needing something and then waited until something fitting the bill hit an emotiona note, or whether I just walked into the store and bought something on emotional impulse, it was good.
What Doesn't
- Capsule/influencer purchases worked only when a) I saw something that triggered an emotional reaction (example - two summer-weight button-ups that I lemminged from Instagram posts), or b) I identified a real practical need and used a capsule as a secondary tool to help (i.e. when I realized I wanted a good gear-but-nice wardrobe
- All of my fails and undecideds were organized but non-emotional capsule/influencer-based purchases, and in fact, this method only yielded one success (black linen soft shorts).
- Most of my fails were in the spring, which makes sense to me since I am so stir-crazy by the end of the winter, I tend to be really into checking out spring trends and chomping at the bit to buy - I need a better method of dealing with this - perhaps needs to book more mani-pedis in the early spring to tide me over (or just go to the mall with no plan and allow for a wild card or two, rather than looking online for guidance).