Ask five people what to do with a bag of outgrown kids' clothes and you'll get five confident answers. Sell, donate, save them forever, save for hand-me-downs, or even better, make a quilt.
You already saved your favorite baby pieces for keepsakes, and there's nobody to hand these down to. The baby quilt will be cute, but what about everything else? And selling takes several afternoons.
So the real question isn't what to do with outgrown kids' clothes. It's what to do with the ones that are still perfectly good.
Selling them
Consignment sales are usually the first choice, right? You sort, tag, price, haul it to a church hall on a Thursday, and a check arrives weeks later for a fraction of what you spent. The work goes in before anyone knows what the return will look like.
Selling online is the same thing, spread over more days. It works great for that one dress from a brand people search for, but what about everything else?
Donating them
Reasonably, this is where most of our stuff ends up.
I want to tell you what happens next, because almost nobody has been told, and I only know because I went looking.
About half of what arrives is judged good enough to sell at all.⁵ That half gets roughly four weeks on the shop floor.⁴
What doesn't sell there goes to the outlet, where it's priced by the pound instead of by the piece. Goodwill San Francisco Bay runs two, in Oakland and South San Francisco. What doesn't sell there gets baled, and then who knows?
Goodwill San Francisco Bay packs 8 to 12 bales of clothing each DAY, and one holds about 1,300 items.⁵ That's the unit your daughter's cardigan is measured in by the end of the week.
Where the trail stops
Past the bale, nobody can tell you anything.
The EPA doesn't count clothing sent to charities for reuse.¹,² In 2024 the GAO told Congress the national data is too thin to work with.³
So "it gets reused" is a hope, not a measurement. The people doing the baling can't tell you which of those 1,300 items found a kid either. I went looking for that number and there isn't one.
None of that makes donating wrong. It's better than a landfill and for most of a bag it's the right call. It just isn't the clean ending we assume it is.
So what do you do with the good stuff?
The bag isn't the problem. The problem is that everything in it is worth something to somebody, and there's no obvious way to get it to them.
That's why I built KidSwaps. Send the things with real wear left in them, they go to another family, and you get credits toward the next size instead. See how it works.
