Clothes & Meals by Mail – Stitch Fix & Green Chef Review

Listen, I have lazy down to a fine art.  Stitch Fix and Green Chef are two companies that are enabling my laziness (or efficiency) by a factor of 1000%.  Can you really have someone buy you clothes by mail, and can someone plan a few of your meals each week, send you all the ingredients to throw together really result in food you want?

Um, hell, yeah!  Let’s start with Stitch Fix.  The idea is pretty simple. You fill out their questionnaire so they can get an idea of what kind of style/size works.  So give them age, sizes, color preferences.  Then you look at pictures of some styles and rate whether you hate them, don’t really like it, sorta like it or love it.  This helps them narrow down what style you’re shopping for regularly, and you can change this any time.  For me, I’m wanting casual clothes that are somewhat boho.

After you fill out the style section, you wait, and you get charged a $20 styling fee, which you can apply as a credit to anything you wind up buying once you get your items.

I’ve gotten two boxes.  They send you normally four clothing items and a piece of jewelry.  First box, I wound up keeping two of the five items – a great teal green top and a fun blue and white print skirt.

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Above are pictures of most of the things I got this week. I kept the striped top on the far left and the necklace that is the third picture from the left.  I also had a dress shipped to me, but couldn’t get a great picture of it.  The style of the dress was all wrong for me, and the cute multi-colored type didn’t fit. *much sighing and pining*    Cost is decent. You get to pick the price range that works for you, but I’ve found most items are anywhere from $25-$50. If you wind up keeping everything in your Stitch Fix box, you get a Buy 5 discount of 25%.  The two items I kept this time were $48 for the navy dolman top and $28 for the teal bauble pendant necklace.  They provide a Priority Postage Paid big envelope to ship everything back that you didn’t want.  Easy, easy, easy. You also can set the frequency.  Every couple of weeks, once a month, once every two months, and you can cancel it any time you want.

Overall, I love Stitch Fix!  I’m finding myself taking items in colors that I’m not sure I would have snatched off the rack for myself, and the jewelry so far has been great. I didn’t keep the necklace in the first one because it was closer to a choker, and I just don’t like something that feels even close to constraining.  So I endorse trying it once, see what you get. If you hate it and send it all back and cancel, you are only out $20.

Food by mail, even trickier.  I tried a couple of places.  One was really good, but I thought some of the recipes were a little complicated, and the other was fresh frozen and not that good.  Then I landed at Green Chef.  It’s like the perfect combination.  Delicious meals that are really healthy, calories are fine, organic, and they don’t take that much time to prepare.

So here’s how Green Chef works.  You pick your dietary profile (carnivore, omnivore or vegetarian.  Then you pick if you want it for 2 or 4 people.  then pick which day of the week you want it delivered.  Easy.  The box comes in the mail packed with ice packs to keep it cold. All the ingredients are packaged separately, labeled, and color coded so you know which meal it goes with (this was the best system I’ve seen so far!).  You get a recipe card with instructions, approximate time to make.  Most things take 20-40 minutes (the longer times usually involve cooking rice or a longer oven back).  Most of the prep takes a few minutes, just chopping some veggies, nothing complicated.  And the meals are deeeelicious!

I’ve put in some pictures of some of the recipes above – Parmesan Crusted Cod, Harissa Steak, Hummus-Sesame Chicken.  Seriously great eats, and the calories per meal seems to run about 500-700’ish, so a nice range, and it keeps you portion controlled.  Since I’m cooking for myself and I get meals for two, this is a two-meal deal, which is great.

The cost for Green Chef isn’t cheap, but it’s not ridiculously expensive either.  For the three 2-person meals or six meals, it is about $89 (no extra shipping) or about $12 a meal.  Even Chick Fil-A and Chipotle seems to clock in about $8-9 by the time you get out of there with one meal, and they are only very marginally healthy-ish.  The $12 a meal seems like a great deal for me, and I’m eating much healthier with it.  Listen, I eat out or order in meals all the time, so this makes sense for me and might not for someone who loves to plan meals, shop or just doesn’t want to spend that much money. I don’t mind cooking, but I HATE meal planning, shopping at the grocery store, etc., and I’ll pay to make someone else do it, and I don’t complain a bit if it’s delicious.

You can cancel the service any time or skip a week or more if you want, you just have to make sure you skip the week on time, before their cutoff date. Most of these services e-mail you a day before cut-off.

The cooler part is periodically they send me voucher for a free week that I can send on to other people. So if you wanted to try this, you can e-mail me (click on the Drop Us a Note at the top of the blog), and I can send your e-mail to them, and they’ll get you a free week voucher so you can try it, which I think is an amazing way to see if it works for you.  I have two of these at this point, so don’t e-mail me unless you are serious.  I’ll send it to the first two e-mails I get.  After that, you’ll have to wait until they give me more coupons!  I’m not sure they deliver to everywhere, so you might want to go check out the site first and put in your zip code to see before you e-mail about the free week coupon.

I’m trying a couple of other meal delivery services too – Plated and Blue Apron.  Plated is about the same price, but they do have more expensive meals and desserts as well.  If you want reviews of those once I try them, I’m happy to write those up later, just let me know in the comments!

So have you tried Stitch Fix, and what did you think?  Love to hear other’s opinions or what you’ve heard.  Same with meal delivery, have you ever tried it?