Have you ever witnessed a room full of people spontaneously bursting into excited applause after witnessing someone fold an item of clothing?
Not only have I witnessed it, but I've also been one of the applauders.
To an outsider, this moment may have looked like a simple, maybe even borderline boring laundry-folding demo, but to the 80 attendees of the KonMari Consultant Seminar, a three-day event building on the success of Marie Kondo's organizational best-seller “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” (and its illustrated sequel, “Spark Joy”) that took place in downtown Chicago last weekend, it was a sign of artistic mastery.
Participants were asked to bring an item of clothing they found difficult to fold (Kondo's books include detailed prescriptions for folding various items). One woman brought forward an asymmetrical blouse that had stumped her group, and the instructor, an affable but deliberate Japanese woman named Mitsugu Ando, had just gotten it to stand vertically on its own (a signature of the KonMari folding method).
Applause well-earned.
KonMari refers to both an organizing methodology and a growing international brand that sprouted from the global following garnered from Kondo's tidying books.
The seminar concept, started last year with events in New York and San Francisco, is a way for participants to take the teachings from the book even further, marking the first step toward becoming certified as KonMari organizing consultants who utilize Kondo's methods.
The KonMari method is a “new approach to decluttering based on Japanese values in order to surround yourself with items that spark joy,” according to
“I really wanted to talk to other people who are excited about it and hear more inside tricks,” said Sarah Rose, a native of Switzerland who started an organizing business (One Cut Organizing Inc.) in Oak Park in June and bases her own work on the KonMari method. “There are so many things you can learn, the tiny little things that really help in the end.”
Summer Love Wade, who made the trip from Sarasota, Fla., also recently started her own organizing business (Living Simple). She went through the tidying process when her mother had cancer and pulmonary fibrosis, and it not only helped her tidy but helped her find clarity; she quit her job and started her tidying career.
“When that energy shifted from ‘I don't want this' to ‘I do want this,' that's when I made the switch,” she said. She signed up for the seminar to continue on the organizing path. “I felt like there was a nugget that was missing that I really wanted to know.”
In order to attend the seminar, participants must have completed the method in their own homes and submitted photographic evidence to prove it, so even those who have not yet started helping others have at least seen the method in action in their own lives.
“I decluttered my home and started organizing in a different way, and I thought, ‘Wow,' ” said Anastasia Mora, a native of Costa Rica living in Colombia.
“On this side of the world, we attack the problem or the disease when it's there. The Japanese are preemptive. I think tidying is a way of being preemptive with a lot of things in your life.”
Though Ando led the seminar (in Japanese, with an English translator), Kondo (who also spoke Friday night at the Chicago Humanities Festival) made a brief appearance on the final day, her tiny stature only highlighting her outsized influence as she gave a motivational speech, asking participants to “contribute to a world that sparks joy through tidying.”
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