What’s your wardrobe really worth?

If you had to put a value on what your wardrobe is worth how easy do you think it would be? I had to think about that question a couple of years ago when I moved to Australia for a year and had to fill in insurance forms quoting the value of my personal effects to be sent across the world. It was not an easy task!

British high street retailer River Island has launched a new online calculator to help us work out exactly what our wardrobes are really worth. The tool the Wardrobe Calculator is open to all UK consumers and in addition to telling us what our own wardrobe collections are worth, allows us to compare our spend with others in the UK.

The online calculator is divided into categories, such as shoes, dresses and handbags to simplify calculations and asks users to enter the amount of each item they have, and whether the item in question is either high street or designer. I’m assuming the calculator then assigns an average amount for each piece, based on either high street or designer prices.

In order to find out what the average River Island consumer’s wardrobe is worth, the fashion retailer surveyed 1,000 shoppers. The survey showed that on average, in the UK we own around £3,600 pounds worth of shoes. We spend more on footwear than anything else, with the category accounting for close to a quarter of our total clothing budget. Proof of our nationwide obsession with footwear!

Not surprisingly women own nearly three times as many pairs of shoes than men and are more willing to spend more than £100 on clothes and accessories each month.

I had a go and I’m not sure if I’m proud or embarrassed of my suggested total, it’s a fair bit more than the average apparently, and that’s all I’m saying!