About Common Closet

Common Closet is an online consignment and donations service with the purpose of providing affordable clothing to all students on campus, reducing clothing waste, rejecting the principles of fast-fashion clothing consumption and encouraging students to participate in a circular economy.

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With the local drop-off and pick-up points, we hope to provide Yale students with a system as accessible as possible in order to increase the volume of used clothing in circulation and donated to New Haven. Through a centralized website, we aim to make secondhand clothing more straightforward for buyers and sellers. Finally, by implementing an FGLI discount, we hope to make this platform equitable and provide an alternative more affordable than ethical clothing brands and more sustainable than fast fashion brands.

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Establishing a university-wide secondhand clothing market has the potential to greatly reduce waste, decrease the Yale community’s carbon footprint, and instigate a shift in the student body toward environmental choices that are equitable and affordable. The model is self-supporting and student-run, ensuring that the services it provides can easily adapt overtime to the needs of the Yale student body.

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Common Closet stands to be an innovative solution that addresses problems on the scale of the student body and the larger New Haven community. As a world leader among institutions of higher education, Yale has the capacity and the opportunity to demonstrate that markets can be designed to be ethical, equitable, and sustainable, while benefiting its student body and reducing its environmental impact.