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March 18, 2024 18 mins

For the 3rd season of What's This Place? Podcast, I'm gonna tell some stories and spill some tea (or some neon pink dye) on fashion .
What have Lucky Sevens got to do with launching a Poshmark Account?!
Yer gonna need to go inside to find out :)

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Miranda Black (00:00):
Hi guys, my name's Miranda Black and this is
what's this Place Behind theClicks and Mortar.
Now, today, for me, recordingright now my reality, it's March
17th 2024.
Now, for you it's probably notthat day, it's another day, but
I just want to call out this daybecause on March 17th 17 years

(00:24):
ago, which was actually 2007, at497 Bloor Street West a lot of
7s I opened my first bricks andmortar store.
Now that that store was notreally what I truly wanted, it
wasn't my dream store at all,but it is a really big part of

(00:45):
my path in this world.
So I just want to stop andhonor that day.
But also I want to make anannouncement, and I couldn't
think of a more perfect day todo that than March 17th, the
17th anniversary of my retailjourney way back in 2007 at 497
Bloor Street West.
Because 7s, they are a classy,not classy, they're classic,

(01:09):
they're kind of classy, but it'sa classic lucky number, lucky
7s.
Which made me wonder why are 7sso lucky?
And because I'm a researchjunkie, not just for fabrics
like why do cotton and linenfeel so darn good together?
They do.
Just check it out.
Whenever you see cotton andlinen, just feel it.

(01:30):
Ugh, it's delicious, but that'sresearch for another podcast.
Why is 7 such a lucky number?
So I started to research and itdoes have something to do with
like the 7 original planets aswe could see them with the naked
eye, which led to the 7 days ofthe week.
I just skimmed that part, butthen they went into how the 7

(01:52):
has traditionally been writtenLike.
At first it was just kind oflike a 1 with a curve at the top
like an upside down J, but thenit gradually morphed into the 7
we know today.
But even that is kind ofdifferent around the world.
Like I write my 7s with a linethrough the middle of the stick

(02:14):
and that's only common to ahandful of countries.
It's like the seven in this wayof writing the seven is saying
I am not a one.
Look at the line through mymiddle, I am a seven with a sexy
waist.
And I remember the moment Idiscovered this way of writing

(02:34):
my sevens, because it's not howI learned the seven when I was a
little kid.
I discovered it in maybe thirdor fourth grade and I just I
took the time to change my habitof writing the regular seven
and I started writing the sevenwith a line through the middle,
and I don't think it was allthat easy to change.

(02:55):
It was really deliberate thelook of my new seven.
At that time it was moreimportant to me than the times
table which I was actuallylearning.
And it isn't easy to change ahabit like you're writing.
If you've ever done one ofthose behavioral therapy
exercises where you do somethinghabitual, like like brushing

(03:18):
your teeth, you do it a bitdifferently for a week, like you
brush your teeth with the wronghand for a whole week, and the
experiment is just there to showyou how hard it is to change a
habit.
Because let me tell you it washard to brush my teeth with my
left hand and it brought up abunch of feelings like this

(03:41):
sucks, I cannot do that, this isa waste of time, I don't want
to do this.
And you just listen to allthose thoughts and you observe
them, like how does it make mefeel to do something out of my
comfort zone?
And what thoughts do I tellmyself when I'm trying something
?
That's new and not easy?

(04:03):
But when you're a kid, you'reconstantly doing new stuff, like
adding a line to your sevens orteaching your eyebrow to raise
up like just the one.
Raise up that one eyebrow.
I'm trying to do it right now.
I can still do it a little bitbecause I spent like real time
in the backseat of my car not mycar, the backseat of my parents

(04:24):
car teaching.
My one eyebrow was my left, toraise it up so that when someone
said something interesting orif I found something cool, I
could raise up that eyebrow.
And I think it probably lookedkind of precocious on a nine
year old.
But my sister's boyfriend hecould do it and he used that

(04:44):
eyebrow lift like a laser.
He would have been a teenagerat the time but he seemed like
an adult to me and I honestlybelieved that this guy was
destined to be the next PrimeMinister of Canada based on that
eyebrow lift alone.
So I taught myself way back.
When you don't even notice thework that goes into teaching

(05:04):
yourself something like that oryou notice it but you love it
there's a juice behind it thatgives you the momentum to just
practice raising your lefteyebrow like a thousand times
until you got it, or rememberingto write your sevens with a
line through it, even if you gotto go back and correct the
sevens and write the lines allthrough, the ones that you
forgot, and you do it with zeroresentment.

(05:27):
It's just the juice of loving.
It sustains you.
Now, that's not how I felt withthe tooth brushing exercise
that I hated.
I was an adult, I had my way, Ihad my style, but it was such a
great exercise on how stuck wecan get in our lanes in our

(05:49):
style and I wondered if it alsorelates to our dressing style,
because I've gone through thishuge transformation since I
closed my store in 2019.
And I would have been goingthrough this transformation with
or without the pandemic.
I can see that now, lookingback, Now that we're coming out

(06:09):
on the other side, I know thatmany of the habits I had as a
bricks and mortar store ownerthey needed to go, but the
pandemic made it a longerprocess.
But the great thing is that,because of the pandemic, I am
not alone.
We are dealing withtransformations on a weekly

(06:31):
basis.
Right now.
It's an age of transformation.
You can call it the acceleratorage or the age of loneliness
I've heard it called that or theAI age, but whatever you choose
to call this time we're in.
It is all about transformation.
It is the age of brushing yourteeth with your opposite hand or

(06:53):
writing your sevens with a newflourish every single week, and
we can either resent it andfight it and refuse to try, or
we can just practice withsomething new.
Maybe not brushing your teeth,because, honestly, once the week
was done, I just happily wentback to right handed tooth
brushing.
But the lesson it can trickleinto other areas.

(07:15):
So that's why I'm using today,the 17th of March, the 17th
anniversary of becoming a bricksand mortar retailer, to
announce that I started sellingonline.
I think I'm having a heartycheck here.
It's something I said I wouldnever do, because how can you
check out the fit, the fabric,how can I do my research?

(07:36):
Well, the thing is I get to dothe research for you and I love
that.
That gives me the juice.
So it's all pre-loved orvintage clothing and the great
surprise of this work to me isthat I get to do so much more
research than I did in my store.
When you have a store, youcarry well, in my store it was a

(08:01):
boutique, so not as many itemsas if we had like a department
store or whatever, but we hadmaybe 30 main brands, that's 30
companies to research, and Ionly added new brands maybe once
a season.
But now I source my items, Ihave 60 garments.
It's often 60 different labelswith 60 different fabric

(08:23):
contents.
Oh my God, it's so great andvintage, true vintage.
It is wild to research and trackdown because there was no
internet when these clothes werebeing born.
Many of the brands that I readthey're out of business,
especially when they're from thelast century and unfortunately,
a lot of amazing heritagebrands have gone out of business

(08:47):
in the last five years.
They were around for 50, 100years and it just, it just my
heart goes out to thefamily-owned brands who had to
deal with the crush of fastfashion and the decisions they
had to make and the knowledgethat they were so great and they

(09:08):
had such great quality and theypaid their employees a living
wage here in Canada and they hadto compete with this crap of
fast fashion.
And the crap was winning andyou could even say it has won.
But just let's just take amoment to pour one out, for all

(09:28):
that's been lost in fashion insuch a short period of time.
But I feel like I'm saving andpreserving the pieces that I
find for future lovers oftextiles who do value quality
and history.
So this is a work in progress.
It's not polished and thatalone is an uncomfortable state

(09:51):
of being, because I like tounveil things when they've been
vetted and they're as close toperfect as I possibly make them.
My fifth anniversary party comesto mind, when I had I just had.
I had the perfect party.
I had the perfect windowdisplay and the perfect caterer.
I wore a fabulous dress and I'mactually right now trying to

(10:12):
remember what happened to thatdress.
Maybe I lent it to somebody,but I had employees and a team.
But this is me now writing mysevens with lines through them.
So what's this place?
It's me on Poshmark.
Yeah, yeah, I'm.
I'm choosing Poshmark, whichfeels super unglamorous to say,

(10:34):
but I think it's a great placeto get my feet wet Just to
figure out logistics andshipping and packaging and do my
research and make mistakes,cause that's business.
We're all going to makemistakes.
You can search for me theD-Growth Diva, but yeah, I'm
selling online on Poshmark andthose are words I never thought

(10:55):
I would say.
But before I go, I just want toshare something I learned about
fashion, or I want to.
I just want to do this littlesegment.
It's something I learned aboutfashion or clothing, something I
find fascinating.
So this one is about the Aaronsweater.
Do you know the Aaron sweater?
A-r-a-n.
It's that traditional sweaterthat has that fisherman type

(11:19):
quality to it, or like a personwho smokes cloves, cigarettes
and has a beret or whatever.
It's not dyed, so it's woolcolor.
The wool color is like a sheepcolor, beige.
I actually had a reallygorgeous one I found on a trash
bin in New York.
It was folded really nicely andI just nabbed it right away,

(11:41):
stuffed it in my backpackbecause I knew it was quality,
even though I barely knewanything about fashion back then
.
I was just sort of starting toknow about fashion.
But this week I was listening tothis podcast called the blind
boy podcast.
You should really queue it up.
And well, I did know this partbecause I actually grew up on a
sheep farm that sweaters theyrepel water due to the oil in

(12:07):
the sheep it's the lanolin, andif you stroke a sheep your hand
can get quite oily, just likerub it in because it's really
it's good for your skin.
But nowadays they strip offmost of that oil off the wool
because I imagine it would bekind of stinky.
Sheep are a little bit stinkyand it would stain all your
furniture and you know what?
You're not at sea, so you don'tneed that kind of weather

(12:29):
protection.
But what I didn't know is theAran Island sheep.
They are extra oily sheep.
They're super water repellentand the knitting patterns inside
the sweater.
I think some of them peoplecall them cable knit.
That's just one of the patternswithin an Aran sweater.

(12:50):
It's like the one that lookslike a rope or you can have
these little noblies on them orhoneycomb.
But there's this myth thatWikipedia says isn't true.
They say that the patterns inthe Aran sweaters have no
meaning at all and I just, Ijust can't prescribe that Like

(13:10):
no meaning.
These pagans who had suchreverence for the sea and the
wind and nature, just knittingrope patterns or honeycomb
patterns, you know, randomlyinto the sweaters of their men,
with no meaning or thought intothem?
Yeah, I don't, I don't think so.
I strongly feel in my bonesthat they must have had some

(13:31):
meaning to them.
But the this guy, blind boy, hegoes on to say that the sailors
, or the fishermen, not only didthey have their Aran sweaters
on but they also had thesepatterns knitted into their
socks.
And the idea of the myth of itis that the Aran socks would

(13:52):
have been knitted with patternsthat were unique to each
individual fisherman.
So if their body got lost atsea, the body might decompose,
but the Aran socks with thelanolin protecting it wouldn't,
and you could identify the bodyby the pattern woven into the

(14:12):
socks.
That is fashion, people.
Oh my God, I love that fashionstory.
Whether it's true or not, it'sjust a great story.
If you're interested in the Aransweater has been peaked, just
search for one on Poshmark.
You don't have to buy new orknit one, but I don't have any

(14:32):
in my closet.
I did a search on Poshmark.
There's lots.
It's not fair isle.
I saw someone listed somethingas a fair isle Aran sweater.
This is not something.
This is somebody who has notdone their research.
Fair isle is from Scotland.
Fair Isle I-S-L-E.
It's like island.
It's a totally differentcountry.

(14:54):
Aaron's sweaters are fromIreland, from the Aaron Islands.
So that's my story about LuckySevens and Aaron's sweaters and
trying something new.
I do have a question for you Doyou like this podcast?
Because I don't have a Patreonor anything at the moment.
But if you share this podcastwith one person, that would

(15:18):
really help me out.
Or if you write a nice reviewon Apple.
I'm shocked at how much areview bumps my status in the
rankings and when you thinkabout it.
If I had ads it would take upat least 120 seconds of your
time, or the time it takes youto like get your thing and skip
it forward.
But you could just write areview.

(15:39):
I bet you could do it in 15seconds, not just clicking a
star, just doing the stars.
I do love them.
I have lots of those as well,but it doesn't seem to do
anything for my ranking, likehow popular Apple says I am.
It's the written review thatreally does it.
For me, your review is like araised eyebrow to Apple.

(15:59):
It's like a seven with a slashthrough it.
It gets attention.
So if you want to follow myPoshmark account, you can easily
find me at D growth diva.
That's D, e, g, r, o, w, t, h,underscore D, I, v, a.
I'm slowly adding items everyday.
They're quite delicious.
My name is Miranda black, the Dgrowth diva.

(16:20):
I'll see you next time.
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