Time for another book report! This one has an affiliate link towards the bottom!

Consumed by Aja Barber

Examining our relationship to things

My relationship with things has always been fraught. Waffling between thinking that I don’t have enough or that I have too much used to be my norm. Fear of missing out, the grass is always greener, keeping up with the Joneses – the name of this feeling has changed with new generations, but the idea is the same – we always want what someone else has.

Enter my favorite book that I read in 2022 – Consumed by Aja Barber*. Full disclosure that I am a member of her Patreon and think it’s one of the best subscriptions that I pay for.

Overcoming retail therapy

Reading Consumed I learned that I am not alone. Lots of us have binged on clothing and fashion when we wanted to have THE MOST STUFF EVER, and turned away from choosing fewer, better things. Lots of us have also had guilt feelings about contributing to over-consumption.

Fewer, better things

I’ve thought a lot about consumption via my jewelry business – I never wanted to make disposable jewelry – I always wanted to create lasting pieces. That practice of making lasting objects began to extend to my shopping habits, as I worked harder to find clothing that would last longer, even if it meant spending a little more or waiting a little longer. 

Changing my own consumption practices also gave me more empathy for my own customers. It’s a big part of the reason why I offer ring resizes and repairs for free for the first year and for nominal fees after the first year. It’s a way of creating trust with customers that I am creating lasting work that they can have repaired.

What is the core problem? Hint: it’s colonialism

She also has a laser focus on what the problems are (colonialism!) and who is accountable (Mostly corporations, but consumers have work to do breaking old habits) all the while pointing us to better ways of having a relationship with all of our stuff.

Is it the same for the jewelry industry?

No surprise, but we in the jewelry industry can draw a lot of parallels to how we consume and sell our work. Some of the same issues in clothing and fashion plague our industry too.

Colonialism? Yes. The jewelry industry extracts resources from poorer countries in the Global South and takes most of the profit with it, relegating tasks like environmental clean-up to the people they leave behind. We can do better.

Exploitative labor? Yup, we’ve got that too! Barber points out that often times it is easy to avoid thinking about fashion’s supply chains because we in the Global North are far removed from the environmental and labor issues. That should sound pretty familiar to us in the jewelry industry.

What other ways does the fashion industry create waste?

She also speaks to some issues in the fashion/retail industry that learned from my years of working in retail and jewelry production, but it was affirming to see it in print since it is more likely to just be whispered about. Like the fact that small designers can be taken advantage of by larger department stores and have entire orders returned for small things like delivering a day late. Yes, it happens and it sucks for small designers and creates more waste.

She constantly and consistently shows us how each of us makes seemingly small choices that add up to large impacts. How we shop, how much we buy, examining what we actually need and who we choose to support with our dollars can affect industries at large.

It was an eye-opening read on so many fronts, written clearly and engagingly and I haven’t stopped talking about it with everyone I know. If I had a star rating system for my book reports it would get 6 out of 5 stars.

Long story short, (too late) if you are looking for an excellent resource on what changes we as a society need to make to our habits and to our industries, her book gives us a path forward.

This was only the second book report I’ve done, and I look forward to reading and writing more!**

XO

Sharon

*I prefer Bookshop.org for ordering books. Powell’s too! Bookshop is a fine alternative to Amazon and your money spent there goes back to support independent bookstores. Powell’s sells a combination of new and used books.

If you use this link to order Consumed from Bookshop, I may receive a percentage of the sale, but you don’t have to order it through this link.

Alternatively, you can request this book from your local library – library requests are a great way to boost an independent author’s sales and visibility!

**My last book report was on a nearly 100 year old metalsmithing textbook.