For me, it’s the calmness it brings me on a busy day. Clutter and disarray make most of us feel overwhelmed and out of control, but coming up with solutions and systems amid a busy life, can be a daunting task.
This is the story of how I came up with an easy solution for YOUR everyday organization problems:
When my sons were teenagers and playing sports, they went through so much laundry! I’d have to do a couple of loads every day just to keep up. And with several loads of laundry came constant sorting, because they wore about the same size clothes.
As you can imagine, as I sat there tirelessly sorting loads and loads of laundry–from compression shorts and shirts to athletic socks–everyone seemed to have the same size and color: black. I’d sit there and line socks up in order to make pairs and decide whose was whose.
For clothing items, I’d have to read labels to determine sizes for every shirt and pair of shorts in order to get them to the correct owners. I tried labeling their items but a black permanent marker didn’t work on black garments, and if I was lucky enough to have a white tag to mark on, the permanent marker soon faded and I was back to square one. I knew I needed to come up with something to differentiate owners for each garment in order to keep my sanity.
I was working full-time, running kids to games and practices, assisting in caring for my aging parents, attending high school events, cooking meals, and all the things that go along with running a household.
I enlisted help from everyone in the family to try and conquer the laundry chaos, but they wound up as frustrated as I was!
Sure, we could have done individual loads for each family member to keep things separate but that wasn’t a great solution because it added time, and wasted water and energy.
I couldn’t imagine doing a quarter load for one son who needed his sports gear ready for the next day…
This is when I came up with the idea to start sewing colored embroidery thread onto each garment as a color-coordinated system for matching items to each owner.
By assigning each person in the house a color, laundry became so much easier and provided a simple solution to an everyday problem. I was proud of my solution because this was totally something my mother would have done. She grew up with eight siblings during the depression, and she was always repurposing items in the home and thinking up new ideas for household organization.
But my stitching solution wasn’t perfect. Because while sewing colored thread onto each garment of clothing did bring organization to the “socks chaos,” it also required a time commitment.
So I set out to find a better solution. After much research and refining, TAGit was born. TAGit products offer a color-coded, easy-to-apply, identifier for clothing, creating a simple system for getting your home (and the people living in it) organized.