Joan Moore got to Phoenixville's recent green festival early so she could set up the clothing swap.
Good thing.
"Before I knew it, I was surrounded by bags of clothes," she recalls. People brought so many clothes that she abandoned the rule that you had to bring some to get some.
It was too much to even take back to her vintage clothing and consignment shop, the Lulu Boutique, in Phoenixville. She began telling everyone, "Please look. If you're interested in anything, take it!"
The nation's traditional economy isn't so good. But its swap economy seems to be thriving.
People swap not just clothing, but also books, movies, games, toys, tools, and more.
They swap in person. And online.
"It's something that's going to continue to grow," said Perry Lowe, a marketing professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass. "It's for real."
He's studied the swap economy, and while many probably started to swap to be frugal, it's becoming more and more a matter of being green.
"It's now, quite frankly, cool and important," he said.
Former Philly girl Lisa Gansky - who once owned seven bicycles - would agree. She thinks we're on a "stuff hangover." Now we're trying to make sense of it.
Or just get rid of it.
She looks at the swapping economy a little more broadly, including sharing and renting possessions - as in the Vancouver family who rented their parking space during the 2010 Olympics.
"My way of thinking about it is that unused value is waste," she says.
Gansky's 2010 book, The Mesh, explores the swap/share/rent economy as a new business model.
We're shifting to "a world in which access to goods, services, and talents is going to triumph over the ownership of them," she says.
Technology is helping.
Consider, Gansky says, doing a search for a lawn mower on a smartphone.
Instead of finding three nearby places to buy one, as you would have a few years ago, what if you found three neighbors who would rent or lend you one instead? Or swap it for use of your snowblower come winter?
Gansky sees this not as anticapitalism, but as a shift. Some swapping is free, but there's also money to be made here.
Her website - http://meshing.it/ - lists about 5,000 businesses and communities in 32 categories that have entered this world of trades, transfers, and shares.
Sites such as www.Thredup.com for swapping children's clothes are popular, considering how fast kids grow.
Gansky talks of office-swapping for business travelers.
