Reason #4638 to hire a copywriter: Upcycling

My dear, adorable friend, Jenni Avins just astounds me. I may have mentioned her to you before. She has a blog called, Closettour, and she is, in the true flavor of a Gen Y’er (I think she’s in Gen Y—regardless, she’s younger than me), turning the world upside down and doing it her own way. She has boundless energy and she…well…she just makes the coolest shit happen.

Her ‘genre’, if you will, is a mash of fashion, sustainability, history/origin/storytelling and journalism (read: new media).

I wanted to share one of her webisodes with you so that 1) you could get a hit of her—the enthuse will stick with you all day, and b) because its concept, I think, is spillable to our focus here. (That would be, in case you got lost, ‘writing where you want to go’—’writing’ being code for ‘however you create’, of course.)

In this webisode, Jenni is trying to clean out her closet. Which is exactly like me trying to clean out my writingroads.com cache of posts and drafts. I mean, how can I throw any of it away? As for the completed posts, each word has meaning and memory. As for the hundreds of drafts I have, ummm…I might use them someday. Those of you wondering, ‘Why would you want to throw any of it away?’ I love you.

Alas, in the midst of her heart-wrenching struggle to closet-thin, Jenni heard about these extraordinarily magnificent English women that call themselves Junky Styling. Kerry and Annika take your old clothes, the ones that you just can’t let go of, the ones that might still serve some sort of critical purpose…and make them new again.

They don’t call it recycling, they call it—upcycling. Because they are making your items better. They are bringing them up—to now. To what you want now, to what you need now. And they do it in a way that lets you hang on to the past, the what if, the hope, the thread.

For all intents and purposes, if you are someone that likes to hold on to things, the women of Junky Styling are actualizing our deep belief that all of those items—be they skirts, one line random thoughts, sweaters, poems, scarves, postless titles or whatever—were purchased or devised and then held on to for a real reason.

So I started thinking about how amazing it would be to have Junky Styling for words and ideas. People that take ideas, scraps of words, worn out prose, random concepts, hopes, futures, bits of brilliance that just didn’t match the rest of your message or ad or article—and upcycle them. Turn them into clear, concise, wordy perfection–exactly what you need now.

And then I remembered that we already have people that do just that.

Oh, how I love my job.

Behold Jenni Avins below in all of her Closettour glory:

CLOSETTOUR: Wardrobe Surgery with Junky Styling from Jenni Avins on Vimeo.