Why no-buy and underconsumption challenges are trending in 2025

Under-consumption is trending

“No-buy” or “no-spend” challenges are nothing new, but the volume of those taking part, at least according to social media, has reached a fever pitch in 2025.

Despite its name, no-buy doesn’t mean literally buying nothing. Essentials, like food and medication, are obviously allowed, while most participants, like Boyd, have set parameters for themselves, permitting a little discretionary spending. But all have the same unifying thrust: to reduce consumption and find freedom from the endless cycle of consumerism.

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Nina Gbor, founder of Eco Styles and circular economy and waste program director at The Australia Institute, thinks the no-buy movement is an extension of “under-consumption core”, a trend revolving around the aesthetics of minimalism that went viral last year.

“The market is really oversaturated. People are tired of the hauls [videos in which people explain recent purchases]and being told what to buy by influencers,” she says.

Gbor thinks this fatigue has been intensified by a deepening cost-of-living crisis, which only makes the gap between the rich and the poor more stark.

“People are tired of seeing celebrities make so much money when everyone’s struggling,” she says.

While Gbor has been pleased to see under-consumption move into the mainstream, she hopes its adopters will retain its lessons beyond the lifecycle of a trend.

“It’s right in the word, right? Trends are short-lived, and now we have micro trends. So the worry is that this will just be another trend for a while.”

‘It gave us hope’

Steph Thompson, a 31-year-old content creator, is a few weeks into her second no-buy challenge. At the beginning of 2024, Thompson and her husband decided something needed to change. They were living paycheck to paycheck in Melbourne on a combined income of about $95,000, but both felt they could be saving more.

Rather than trying to dial back spending, Thompson decided to take a more aggressive approach and go for a year of buying nothing.

“Sometimes it’s easier to just cut everything off than try and scale things back,” she says.

The couple’s no-buy year had some ground rules: No unnecessary spending; if something broke or ran out, they’d replace it; one takeaway meal and one takeaway coffee were allowed each month, given they came out of the grocery budget; $100 for their birthday and Christmas presents; and $30 each month for activities, provided it got them out of the house.

Thompson feels strongly that this wriggle room was essential for their sanity.

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“If you’re miserable all the time, it’s so much harder to fix your spending. So that was really a priority: how do we balance the no-buy year while also making room for having a nice life that we enjoyed?”

As part of the no-buy, Thompson and her partner made a point of only doing free activities with friends, shopping once a month at Aldi to avoid impulse purchases and only subscribing to one streaming service at a time.

While Thompson says the year was hard, particularly when it came to missing out on live music and hobbies, ultimately, the challenge brought them “peace”.

And while frugality can often put a strain on relationships, Thompson says it made her marriage stronger.

“It gave us hope because when you are in that paycheck-to-paycheck cycle until you actually solidly remove yourself from it, you can feel like you’re never going to get out of it.”

Having made significant contributions to her savings and paid off two small credit cards in 2024 (an impressive feat given her husband was forced to take a pay cut early in the year), Thompson is embarking on another no-buy this year, with slightly more lax rules.

“It’s more of a low spend,” Thompson says, “but the language of no-buy just helps us stick to it better.”

‘The best thing has been the mental clarity’

For Liz Sunshine, a Melbourne-based photographer, the idea for a no-buy year has been percolating for some time. Having worked in the fashion industry since 2009, she’s seen first-hand how social media and fast fashion have driven consumption to its peak.

In 2022, she took a month off shopping, although she says she “bought clothes in the lead-up and made up for it the following month”. Then, in 2023, Sunshine limited her purchases to 27 items. Last year, she reduced this to 12 new items and unlimited secondhand before deciding to go all in on August 1.

The rules? Nothing wearable, including socks and underwear, no second-hand or vintage, and no clothing swaps. Sunshine allowed herself a modest list of approved purchases, including a rattan beret she’d commissioned from a milliner and any photography equipment that needed replacing.

Sunshine has been documenting her journey on social media and her eponymous Substack, where she’s been exploring her relationship with clothes for the past four years.

She says so far, the challenge has been easier than expected.

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“The best thing has been the mental clarity. I’m looking at clothes from a new perspective and realigning many areas of my life in small ways. For example, I use social media less but more intentionally; I’m reading more and have started knitting again,” she says.

Like Boyd, Sunshine has used her shopping pause to take stock of her wardrobe but has taken a slightly less aggressive approach.

“My relationship with clothes is complicated, so my wardrobe has been a complicated space,” she says, explaining she has kept some clothes she doesn’t wear often or that don’t fit her.

“As a woman whose body always changes – with stress, lack of sleep and hormones – I decided it was logical to have clothes in two sizes. I don’t have ‘fat’ or ‘skinny’ jeans, I just have jeans, and I switch them back and forth depending on what feels best,” she says.

Now at the halfway point, Sunshine says she is focusing on addressing the “emotional” reasons behind her shopping, collecting inspiration for future outfits and looking at having clothes custom-made locally.

‘You can’t shop your way into personal style’

For many people, fashion is a way of projecting an image of who we are to the world. Shopping, then, is an exercise in crafting our future selves: how often have you bought a dress or belt in the belief it would finally be the piece to complete you?

Unable to participate in this, Boyd often felt stuck.

“I felt really badly dressed and ugly a lot of the time, and it was very hard to not be able to solve that by just buying something …[but] what I realised is, no one cares about what you’re wearing as much as you do.”

This also allowed her to experiment with existing pieces and play with new ways of dressing.

While in the end, Boyd bought six clothing items last year, exceeding her goal by one, this is still a dramatic reduction from the 37 purchases she’d made the year before. She says doing the challenge has helped crystallise her sense of style and what she actually wants.

This year, she’s allocated herself 12 clothing purchases, most of which she’s already decided on from the data she gleaned from last year’s wardrobe audit.

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