I Trained With Marie Kondo. Here's What I Learned.

Most people who shop with us don't know this: in April 2019 I spent a weekend in London as part of Marie Kondo's KonMari consultant trainee programme, in a room with her and a handful of people who'd travelled from all over the world for it. I never pursued becoming a full-time consultant, but one question from that weekend has stayed with me every day since.

Does this spark joy? It sounds almost too simple to be useful, and I think that's exactly why it works. Hold the thing. Actually notice how it feels in your hands, rather than what it cost or who gave it to you or what you're supposed to feel. Let that answer decide whether it stays. Most of us have never been taught to ask a question that direct about our own belongings, and once you start, you can't quite stop.

What surprised me that weekend, and what I think gets lost in how the method is usually talked about, is that it was never really about owning less. It was about paying attention. Marie wasn't trying to get any of us down to some minimal ideal number of possessions. She was trying to get us to actually feel something when we picked an object up, instead of walking past it for the thousandth time without seeing it at all. Joy was never the reward for owning fewer things. It was the point of owning anything to begin with.

I still ask that question constantly, and running a shop full of objects has only sharpened it. Some things spark joy the moment you hold them, which is the easy version everyone talks about. But I've learned the harder version matters just as much: some things earn it slowly, through use, through the particular kind of wear that only comes from being loved rather than kept safe. A piece of vintage silver that sat tarnished and overlooked on a market table for years can spark real joy the day someone finally takes it home and starts using it properly — which is more or less the whole argument I've made here before, and the reason our silver care guide tells you to leave the tarnish sitting in the low points of a pattern rather than polish it all away. The question is the same one Marie taught me. I've just learned to be patient with the answer.

It also turns out the question scales further than one object at a time. A single vase either sparks joy or it doesn't, but a shelf of them gathered slowly over time sparks something a one-object test was never quite built to catch, and I don't think that's a contradiction of the method so much as an extension of it. The question was always the right one. I've just ask it for longer than most people would.

That's really the whole argument behind everything we sell, if I'm honest. Every piece here had to spark something in someone, for us to carry it at all. Marie taught me to ask the question and I carry it forward every time every time something new comes into the shop.