GreenSpace: Let's go swapping: Original commerce goes online

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.

One permutation is communal possessions. Annie Leonard, creator of the Internet movie "The Story of Stuff," told me once that she and her neighbors share ownership of things they need sometimes, but not always.

One neighbor stores the ladder. Another keeps the pickup truck. A third has the swing set. And so on.

All this makes sense. The trap of possessions is the dreaded I-might-need-this-someday syndrome. My theory is that swapping and sharing is an antidote, a good way to pry things out of a closet. It works because you're getting something else that presumably you'll actually use.

By now, swapping can be so swank that some are attaining celebrity status, like the Boston duo the Swapaholics. Featured in national publications, lately they've expanded into food swaps.

To them, swapping isn't just green. It's fun.

"Shopping seems so sterile and solitary and, well, vanilla, when compared with the fun, friendship-driven experience that is a swap," they maintain on their website.

They're now the "event hostesses" for www.swap.com, formed a year ago by fellow Bostonian Jeff Bennett.

He views swapping as the original form of commerce, thousands of years old. Taking the marketplace online simply helps participants access a wider community.

So far, Bennett's site is concentrating on books, DVDs, and video games. But he envisions expanding to other categories, including one in particular he thinks will be a hit - sports equipment.

The business has 1.1 million members, 650 of them in Philadelphia, its fourth-largest market, Bennett said. The most common user is female, age 25 to 45.

Members list what they have and what they want, and computers do the rest.

Bennett makes money from sponsors and by charging for added-value subscriptions.

One of his members is Bill Gallagher of Bryn Mawr. A financial adviser, he originally joined because it was the frugal thing to do.

But now he's into the greenness of the deal. He said the site "does a good job of making you aware of how much you've reduced your carbon footprint" with each swap.

Meanwhile, I'm looking for some of my favorite John Gardner novels. Anyone need the new T. Coraghessan Boyle? Guess I can go online and find out.