The woman who wants to “tidy the world”

Marie Kondo has made a fortune teaching people around the world how to declutter their homes. But for some of her most devoted followers, a well-organised sock drawer is just the beginning. Karen Yossman reports

In the sumptuous, oak-panelled ballroom of a central London hotel, a woman on a dais is folding a T-shirt. First, she smooths the garment, gently running her hands over the black and white fabric with the dexterity of a masseuse, before folding over one side, then the other. She tucks in each sleeve, so that the T-shirt resembles a rectangle (the key, she emphasises through a translator, is to make a rectangle shape), before deftly flipping it into a series of smaller rectangles until it is the size and thickness of a hardback book, then she places it on a table in front of her, spine-side up. With a final, theatrical flourish, the woman removes her hands; the T-shirt remains upright. An enraptured crowd, many of whom have risen from their seats and moved to the front of the stage to get a better look, bursts into applause.

Welcome to Europe’s first Konmari Consultant Seminar, which more than 100 superfans of Marie Kondo, the Japanese tidying guru, have each paid around £1,670 (excluding travel, accommodation and a further annual membership fee of £380) to attend. Some have travelled from as far afield as Australia, China and South America, and many intend to quit their jobs and become professional declutterers or, in Kondo-speak, Konmari consultants (“Konmari” is both Kondo’s nickname and the name of her tidying technique). Ninety-eight per cent of attendees are women.

The course takes place over a particularly hot weekend, a fact Kondo’s assistant only half-jokingly credits to her 33-year-old boss, who, she says, is regularly followed by “crazy-amazing weather”. As well as a tidy home, many devotees claim to experience unexpected episodes of good fortune, which they ascribe to Kondo. In publicity materials, she is often photographed dressed in white, with a beatific smile. In person, however, Kondo has the stiff posture of a self-conscious teenager coupled with the quiet earnestness of Louise Hay, the doyenne of 1980s self-help publishing.

Kondo only makes two brief appearances (on the first and last days of the three-day seminar) and speaks in an almost-whisper, repeatedly saying, through a translator, that her goal is to “tidy the world”. To this end, she is assembling an army to help her, and has so far certified more than 142 Konmari consultants from more than 20 countries since the inaugural international seminar

in New York in 2016. One of Kondo’s first recruits was Nozomi Takeda. As Kondo tells it, six months after their final decluttering session Takeda approached her to ask, “Can I be your disciple?”, and Kondo agreed to take her on as an assistant. Now, according to Kondo, Takeda is one of Japan’s top tidying consultants and, as head of the Konmari training scheme, she travels the world teaching fellow disciples.

It is Takeda who demonstrates the finicky T-shirt-folding technique prescribed in Kondo’s bestselling book, The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up, in front of the mesmerised audience. After carefully setting aside the T-shirt she moves on to an assortment of trickier garments supplied by attendees. Takeda selects a bunny-eared onesie and a fitted bed sheet. “Someone always brings a fitted sheet,” she laughs, adroitly flipping it into a neat rectangle, prompting another round of applause.

Kondo was first thrust into public consciousness in 2014 with the release of that debut book which, together with her follow-up, Spark Joy: An Illustrated Guide to the Japanese Art of Tidying,

has sold 8.5 million copies. A third, Joy at Work: The Career-changing Magic of

Tidying Up, is due to be released in 2020 following a bidding war, and Kondo recently signed a deal with Netflix for a reality show in which she will administer her brand of orderliness to a series of slatterns – and a global audience. She has trademarked the phrase “Organise the world”. Note the imperative.

It is no coincidence that her rise coincided with deepening concerns over consumerism, sustainability and affordable housing, coupled with the fact that even as our homes are shrinking, they are more stuffed than ever. Even Ikea sparked consternation in 2016 when its chief sustainability officer, Steve Howard, said, “In the West, we have probably hit peak stuff.”

Katherine Blackler, president of the UK Association of Professional Declutterers & Organisers (APDO), has reached the same conclusion. “The majority of houses are starting to burst at the seams,” she says. She attributes this 21st century problem to the convergence of a “waste-not-want-not” postwar mentality with the advent of online shopping. She describes one client who, in the course of a three-hour decluttering session, took delivery of six packages while desperately trying to jettison the junk already in her home.

“As well as a tidy home, many devotees claim to experience unexpected episodes of good fortune, which they ascribe to her”

But Kondo’s crusade against clutter doesn’t adequately explain why she stands out in the saturated (and ruthless) world of home organisation. Earlier this year, Margareta Magnusson, author of The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, was touted as the new Scandi Kondo; Marla Cilley, known as Flylady, is a Mumsnet favourite; and the Nashville duo The Home Edit has been endorsed by Gwyneth Paltrow. But none has captured the public imagination like Kondo.

This is partly because she has deviated from the traditional approach to decluttering, which focuses on what to get rid of, rather than what to keep. As she explains during her introductory speech, that was her approach, too, until one day, as a tidying-obsessed teenager, she experienced something akin to a religious epiphany. “I would come home from school every day and without changing out of my uniform, wander round the house with a rubbish bag looking for things to throw away,” she recounts. “One day, when I opened the door of my room, everything in it looked dark and murky and I thought, ‘I hate everything in this room, I’m going to throw it all away, I never want to tidy again.’ And I fell to the ground.” When she awoke two hours later, Kondo says, “Everything in the room was shining and I realised that you shouldn’t be looking for things to throw away, you should be looking for the things you want to keep.”

The resulting Konmari method works like this: first, you divide your belongings into five categories: clothing, books, papers, komono (Japanese for knick-knacks) and sentimental items. Then, in that order, you must assemble every item in each category in one place (a psychological tactic known as the “power of the pile”). Finally, you cradle each item in your hands and decide whether or not it “sparks joy”. If the item sparks joy, keep it: if it doesn’t, you thank it for its service and send it on its way. “When you touch a piece of clothing,” writes Kondo, “your body reacts.”

While the first two days of the seminar are mostly spent covering these exact principles, combined with lots of talk about energy, a few tears and some practical activities, such as clothes-folding and kneeling (the first thing Kondo does when entering a client’s home is kneel on the floor with her eyes closed), the third focuses on turning a passion for Konmari into a business. However, what the most devoted Konverts claim – and what many of those at the seminar divulge – is that the “spark joy” test doesn’t just work on objects. Once they have finished decluttering their drawers, many turn their attention to jobs, friendships and, in the most extreme cases, their spouses.

When occupational therapist Clara Moore read Kondo’s first book four years ago, she experienced a Damascene conversion similar to Kondo’s own. “For me, it was a very quick transformation, in a weekend,” Moore says. “I decluttered my life – and my marriage, because my marriage did not spark joy for me.” She left with her two children, then aged five and one, and soon decided her job wasn’t sparking joy either, so in 2016 she flew to New York to attend Kondo’s first training session.

Based in Scotland, Moore now works as a professional organiser, offering the Konmari method, as well as a more straightforward decluttering service. Her most unusual client has been her ex-husband – their sessions took place in their former marital home. “He says it transformed his life. It was really quite transformative to our relationship as parents [and] as divorced spouses too.” Even the couple’s children, now nine and five, have embraced Konmari; Moore shows me photographs of their Pinterest-perfect drawers, covered in joy-sparking stickers and stacked with neatly folded school uniforms.

Impending motherhood is a common catalyst among female Konverts. I first came across Kondo while I was heavily pregnant, overwhelmed and anxious about how my life was about to change. Although I didn’t experience the kind of seismic shift many of the other attendees describe, I felt it gave me permission to discard items I was clinging on to out of a misplaced sense of duty or sentimentality (unwanted gifts, tchotchkes from holidays) and ended up disposing of five or six bin bags full of stuff. Next I spent a week diligently origami-ing my pants, jumpers and T-shirts, carefully arranging them in a series of bamboo baskets I’d bought from John Lewis – before losing interest and reinstating everything to the “floordrobe”.

But by the time I had signed up to the seminar, I was eager to try again. My commitment, though, pales in comparison with another convert I get speaking to during the seminar, 30-year-old Wojciech Felczak, who is one of only three men present and has travelled to London from Poland to attend. He first came across Kondo in a newspaper three years ago and has since implemented her method in the home he shares with his “hoardish” fiancée – losing 22lb in the process. (Weight loss is reportedly another common side-effect of Konmari.) “A tidy home is very nice,” he says. “But I really realised that this is only the beginning for me.” Recently he launched a Kondo-inspired blog and now plans to leave his job in e-commerce and become a full-time professional declutterer, which is the focus of the seminar on the third day.

First Kondo’s social media manager, Moeko Noda, gives advice on using Instagram; then Christina Cheadle, project manager at the Konmari headquarters in San Francisco, explains how to avoid infringing Kondo’s trademarks. But there is little discussion of more mundane considerations such as tax, insurance, data protection, or even the health and safety implications of entering strangers’ homes and combing through their stuff. Not that this appears to bother many of the Konverts, who eagerly line up at the end of the seminar to pose for a snap with Kondo.

In the last two years, APDO membership has more than doubled to 283, of which a handful are certified Konmari Consultants. Blackler says members charge between £30 and £70 per hour. A single session can often last up to five hours and is far from easy – not least because there’s also the psychological toll of helping people discard their possessions, a role which, in practice, is not entirely dissimilar to that of a therapist.

At the start of the seminar, Kondo was keen to point out the emotional impact of decluttering. “Tidying is a way of looking into yourself,” she explained, recalling one client who confessed during her first session that she planned to divorce her husband as soon as she finished decluttering. However, as this client navigated the process of examining every one of her possessions, she also found herself catechising the sum total of her life. Eventually, during their final session, the client turned to Kondo. “Last night, I touched my husband,” she told her. “And it sparked joy.”

A longer version of this article appeared in The Daily Telegraph © Karen Yossman / Telegraph Media Group Limited 2018

“Once they have finished decluttering their drawers, some turn their attention to jobs, friendships and even spouses”