Marie Kondo is training an army of tidying consultants

Lisa Tselebidis, a KonMari consultant, arrives at my New York City apartment one recent Friday afternoon ready to tidy.

She wraps a thick apron around her waist, which has pockets that hold necessary tools like sticky notes, Scotch tape, and Sharpies. She’s polite but firm, and incredibly serious about the task at hand: helping me get rid of shit.

“We’ll be tackling each and every item, and we’ll get you to a place where you are only keeping the things that support you in your ideal lifestyle,” she says, eyeing the baby toys stacked haphazardly in my living room. “The KonMari method is a holistic approach. It will help you make life changes that will feel gratifying.”

Tselebidis is one of 227 KonMari consultants around the world — that is, professional organizers certified by global best-selling author, Netflix star, and queen of tidy Marie Kondo. Her book, The Life‑Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, cemented her position as an expert on helping people determine which items in their home “spark joy.” On the heels of this success, in 2016 Kondo started KonMari Media Inc. and began offering a training program so fellow organizing devotees could master her tidying methods.

With the debut of her Netflix show, Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, on January 1, Kondo’s popularity has never been stronger — especially in the United States, a country that loves to acquire things. KonMari Media hosts two certification seminars a year, and the upcoming ones in New York and London are already sold out, with more than 115 attendees signed up for each conference. KonMari consultants say they, too, are flooded with requests.

I streamed Kondo’s show, and like many other viewers, I laughed at, cried with, and occasionally judged the families going through the process, all the while wondering what that experience would do for me and my family.

I couldn’t hire Marie Kondo herself to help me reclaim my home, which has become packed with stuff ever since my dear, sweet hurricane of a baby, Joseph, came into my and my husband’s lives last year, promptly destroying any sense of order in our small apartment. Instead, I found Tselebidis on the KonMari consultant database.

Tselebidis’s design style, according to her Instagram, is clean and minimalist, with hints of Kinfolk-resonant Scandinavian style — precisely the opposite of my cluttered, Melissa & Doug-heavy apartment but certainly the aesthetic I aspire to.

Before she became certified in Sparking Joy™, Tselebidis used to work in fashion e-commerce, until she decided that probably wouldn’t lead to happiness. She heard Kondo speak on a podcast a few years ago, and found out that she could take a certification course and follow in Kondo’s footsteps. Tselebidis always had a knack for organizing, she tells me, and now she works with clients all over Manhattan and Brooklyn. She charges me $300 for the initial three-hour consultation and organizing session but says her prices vary.

A few nights before our session, Tselebidis had sent me a short, optional questionnaire riddled with existential questions like “What do you want more of and what do you want less of in your life?” and “What does an ideal day in your life look like?”

I didn’t fill it out, afraid a response like “being able to find shit” would offend her. During our consultation, though, we agree my “ideal home” is one that’s tidy and orderly, in which things are easily findable.

The biggest obstacle? My kitchen pantry, a gaping maw of spices, canned goods, bags of grains, wine, baby food, kitchen appliances, and Mason jars. I’ve made attempts over the years to organize it, but the damn thing always reverts back into chaos, and so Tselebidis and I agree it’s a good place to start our “tidying marathon,” as Kondo dubs it.

By the time Marie Kondo’s methods came to the US in 2014, the mother of two was already a cult figure in Japan. She had accumulated a fan base of “Konverts” who suffered from “Kondomania” — the “high of domestic purging,” as New York magazine put it.

Influenced by the tenets of feng shui, a job at a Shinto shrine, and an innate sense of just being really good at organizing from a young age, Kondo had already written four books about her tidying ideology. She riffed off the Japanese virtue of being neat and tidy, and duplicated the country’s “art of discarding” movement that was all the rage in the ’90s, a culture expert told the New Yorker. But her ideology also taught readers new concepts, like how to appreciate and respect their belongings.

Her book became a best-selling title in the US. Fans began feverishly “Kondo-ing” their homes, and their progress was documented on internet listicles.

The Kondomania then died down a bit, until the recent Netflix show. Now Kondo has become an even bigger international star, with serious influence. Thrift stores have been drowning in donations, and Instagram is cluttered with photos of people applying the KonMari method in their homes. The internet, too, has been clogged with Kondo takes, especially when a rumor started that she only allows people to keep 30 books.

Organizational companies have also seen the Kondo effect. Kondo is not a fan of buying bins and boxes; her method promotes using what you already own, although she did debut a limited-edition set of boxes last year. Consultants like Tselebidis, though, frequently recommend clients buy things at places like the Container Store to better organize their cabinets and closets; observers have noticed that the Container Store has been packed since the show debuted. The company isn’t necessarily Kondo-friendly (a note that went out to employees in 2015 from its CMO noted that her method is “a bit much”), yet its annual revenue has jumped from $748 million in 2014 to $857 million in 2018 — not only because of Kondo, of course, but possibly related.

These days, everyone wants a piece of Kondo and her tidying magic. So she started KonMari Media Inc., which her husband, Takumi Kawahara, runs as CEO, and for which she serves as the “chief visionary officer.” The company began offering the consultancy program in August 2016. The two-and-a-half-day seminars cost about $2,200 and teach consultants how to master Kondo’s ideology.

“The course is a mix of teaching them how to run a business, lectures on how to walk someone through the KonMari process, and then focusing on advancing their skills, like how they can hone in on their folding techniques,” Christine Diaz, who helps run KonMari’s consultant program, told me. “A lot of it is also group discussions, like breaking down different problems they might face. We also coach consultants on how to listen better and remove judgment from the process and guide constructively. Being a good listener and not being judgmental is something we emphasize because all sorts of emotions come out during tidying.”

Early on, Kondo taught some sessions herself. But these days, she typically does short meet-and-greets, and leaves the instruction up to master consultants. The network of certified consultants runs deep, spanning 31 countries, from Thailand to Mexico to France to Israel.

Just because you fancy yourself a tidy person does not mean you can attend a seminar. Those applying for a spot submit a statement attesting they’ve read Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy, and they must send photos proving they’ve applied the tidying method to their own homes.

After the seminar ends, aspiring consultants have to log 50 hours with clients and send detailed notes to KonMari corporate for approval. They must also take a final exam, where they’re tested on different tidying situations (“What happens if a wife wants to tidy but the husband isn’t on board?”).

Once officially certified, consultants land a coveted spot on the website’s database, which Diaz says has seen 10 times its usual traffic since the Netflix show debuted. KonMari consultants are ranked by levels: Green-level consultants, the majority of the graduates, have completed 10 tidying sessions with two clients. Then comes bronze (50 sessions with five clients), silver (100 with 10 clients), and gold (200 sessions with 20 clients). The two top levels, platinum (300 sessions with 30 clients) and master (500 sessions with 50 clients), are the hardest to reach.

Unlike many businesses that require buy-in from a centralized entity, KonMari is not a multilevel marketing company. Once consultants are certified, they are free to work independently and don’t need to buy anything from the organization apart from paying an annual $500 fee.

“I love that we’re independent contractors,” says Kristyn Ivey, a KonMari consultant in Chicago. “It’s up to us to reap the return on the investment, based on how serious we are on building a sustainable business.”

KonMari does have its rules, though. Terms like “KonMari” or “organize the world” are not allowed to be used. Paying the annual fee, however, gives consultants the right to use “spark joy,” a term KonMari has trademarked, in their company names and products.

Plenty of consultants make sure to take advantage of the opportunity to use “tidy” or “spark joy” in their business names. Ivey’s is For the Love of Tidy, and there’s the Tidy Bungalow, the Tidy Moose, Tidied Ever After, Spark Joy Boston, Spark Joy Bay Area, Spark Joy Charlotte, and so on. The business names of these KonMari consultants might not be all that original, but that’s the point, considering they get to use the branding of a global celebrity.

“When we pay our membership fee, it’s for that badge and to have our profile on their website,” Ann Dooley, a 42-year-old mother of two and KonMari consultant living in Brooklyn, says. “It’s a bonus to have someone like Marie out there, promoting this type of work.”

Having the name brand also means these consultants can command a nice fee. Prices vary, but Dooley charges $600 for five hourly sessions, while Tselebidis, as noted earlier, charged me $300 for three — a pretty standard rate in the professional organizing industry. Although you can argue that you can learn the art of tidying on your own just by buying the book or watching the show, KonMari consultants say they’re needed to provide extra support.

“The Netflix series was heavily edited,” Karin Socci, a KonMari consultant from Kansas City, says. “I think they let viewers feel like the task was very much on them, and they are stuck with huge piles. But there were actually consultants working behind the scenes once Marie left, and that’s important to see. I am pulling stuff out with my clients and helping them rearrange their houses in the most respectful and pleasant way possible.”

Some KonMari consultants had previous experience in professional organizing before getting their accreditation. Dooley, for example, is a stay-at-home mom, and was hired by friends to organize their homes before she signed up for the Chicago seminar in 2017.

“I thought I knew how to organize, but I was still organizing every few months and didn’t understand why,” she says. “This method takes your tidying skills to a whole new level. It addresses fear and guilt, and the certification program teaches you how to help people let things go.”

Other KonMari consultants have taken on tidying as a second career. Socci used to work as a clinical psychotherapist before she got bored of sitting in an office. She flew to San Francisco in 2016 to attend the very first KonMari seminar, and now works with six to nine clients around New York state every week. She says the KonMari training has helped her use her psychology training in a different way.

“It’s really a recognition of the vicious cycle of consumerism,” Socci says. “People are so concerned about waste, and this method teaches us to be thoughtful. It also helps people lose interest in buying stuff, because they learn about why they are buying new things and what shopping might be hiding.”

New to the tidying game or not, KonMari consultants agree that Kondo has empowered them to build sustainable careers.

“After working for two decades in vastly male-dominated industries, it’s a fun and powerful change to work in an industry that is almost all women — and to learn from other entrepreneurs who are also moms, wives, or partners, and who genuinely want to help people change their relationships with their homes and their belongings,” says Melissa Klug, a KonMari consultant in Minneapolis.

“I had a 10-year career in construction, and when we had a baby, the early mornings and long days were just not compatible with raising a child,” says Phoebe Cusack, a Boston-based consultant. “Being a certified KonMari consultant allows me to make my own schedule and spend the time I want to spend with our daughter. And most of my clients embark on their Tidying Marathons because they want to spend more [and] higher-quality time with their friends and family.”

The KonMari network, as Klug points out, also helps provide a rebrand of sorts for women doing housework, as the network is mostly women.

“Women are still often in charge of most of the daily efforts to keep a house going, which is not a small amount of work,” she says. “I would love for women to embrace a new kind of domesticity, where they can own that keeping a house is a very rewarding effort.”

Some consultants are taking their tidying business to the next level. Yuriko Beaman, a KonMari consultant in Reading, Pennsylvania, has started booking speaking engagements at wellness centers and Jewish community centers. Socci and Ivey host the podcast Spark Joy, while Ivey, a former engineer, also goes on a “Tidy Tour” at libraries around her city, getting paid to give KonMari 101 talks. Books written by consultants that build off the Kondo method are for sale on Amazon.

“This can be a lucrative, full-time job, but it did take me two years to get to where I am,” says Ivey. “I think having an official certified label is very important to a business’s integrity, and I receive leads all the time from the KonMari database.”

Dooley says the world of KonMari consultants is supportive and sisterly. The cohort communicates in a private Facebook group and often passes clients to each other, based on location and availability. But not everyone in the tidying world is thrilled about the rise of Kondo-branded tidying. The National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals, or NAPO, the New York Times noted in 2016, is “fairly unified in their disdain for this Japanese interloper.”

“They have waged a war through their fuming blog posts and their generally disgusted conversations, saying that she is a product only of good marketing, that she’s not doing anything different from what they’ve been doing since she was in diapers,” the Times wrote.

Much of the criticism leveled against Kondo has also had a racist bent. One NAPO expert told the Times back in 2016 that Kondo’s book was targeted to “a 20-something Japanese girl and you live at home and you still have a bunch of your Hello Kitty toys and stuff.” More recently, some critics mocked Kondo’s unapologetic integration of Japanese culture into her techniques. One writer in the Guardian hedged her racist language but wrote how Kondo believes in “woo-woo nonsense.” Others pointed out that people were using Kondo’s poor English to deliberately misinterpret her, jumping on the opportunity to make her out to be the “other.”

Several KonMari consultants agree that NAPO used to be extremely anti-Kondo early on but feel the organization has changed its mind, perhaps in response to the recent and explosive popularity of the KonMari method. In an email to Vox, Jennifer Pastore Monroy, NAPO’s executive director, clarified that, contrary to what the Times reported, “it has never been an official stance of NAPO’s to oppose Marie Kondo’s popularity or her methodology.”

“NAPO members have a variety of methodologies and business models they employee to work with their clients,” she writes, before explaining why some people in NAPO might feel rather snippy about Kondo: “While Marie Kondo has brought a welcomed greater awareness of the benefits of decluttering to the general public since the release of her first book, NAPO has been working hard for 30+ years in building a profession around evidence-based research, peer-reviewed education curriculum, and professional ethics.”

“Bottom line,” she adds, “is that people who work in the organizing and productivity profession (including Marie Kondo) wholeheartedly believe in the positive impact that decluttering and getting organized can have on their clients’ lives.”

Still, not everyone is a fan of Kondo or her army of consultants. Tova Weinstock, a professional organizer with the business name Tidy Tova who is not a KonMari consultant, says she doesn’t agree with everything in the methodology.

“I think Marie is great because she took what we’ve all already been doing and made it understandable, which I respect,” Weinstock says. “But I don’t think she gets to the root of our problem, which is that we are all buying too much stuff. I tell people to stop. Buying. Stuff. I take pictures of trash and post that to social media. It might be extreme, but I think that if you don’t address it, you will relapse, and her theory doesn’t help people who are constantly shopping.”

Weinstock also isn’t particularly thrilled about professional organizers flooding the market, especially those getting hired partly because of celebrity branding they’ve paid for. “Now everyone is becoming a freakin’ organizer!” she laments.

Weinstock will have to deal with the competition, though, because the KonMari army is growing. KonMari Media Inc. expanded into a “full-on lifestyle brand” this past summer, as Diaz, who works for the brand, puts it, debuting a blog and a newsletter.

The company is also “exploring physical products ourselves.” Over the summer, it debuted a Hikidashi box set, essentially nice cardboard boxes, priced at $89 for three. The sets, of course, sold out, and Diaz didn’t dismiss the idea that there would be more products like it down the line — even though this contradicts the KonMari principle that people don’t need to buy anything to be tidy. In March 2018, Kondo also teamed up with the fashion company Cuyana to make small leather bento boxes for storing joy-sparking items, and Diaz says the company is exploring other similar brand partnerships. KonMari Inc. has been deluged with requests for Kondo herself to appear, and Diaz says the company is also exploring IRL speaking events.

“We’re still very much in the testing phase because the launch of the Netflix show has massively expanded our community, so we’re still trying to listen to them,” she says. “There are lots of possibilities to serve all these people that didn’t pick up the book a few years ago at Barnes & Noble but have seen us on TV and are now ready to dig in.”

Kondo’s Netflix show makes a task like organizing a kitchen look simple. In reality, it’s anything but, and at first I have a pretty hard time determining what sparks joy in my pantry.

I try not to make eye contact with Tselebidis as we go through the contents of my dreadful kitchen pantry, because, as it turns out, the pantry reveals a lot of things about me, especially things I’d rather people not know. That I talk the talk about sustainability, yet I own packs and packs of plastic tableware. That I have tons of baking products, including one-off ingredients like almond extract and toasted coconut flakes, even though I can’t remember the last time I baked. That I’ve been trying to lose my baby weight for 14 months now, but my place is stocked with not-so-healthy healthy snacks.

I know I didn’t need to pay someone $300 to go through this pantry with me, but Tselebidis offering soothing and substantial guidance makes it easier. If I don’t love the fact that I use a paper cup every morning for my coffee, she asks, maybe I can donate them and commit to buying a reusable one?

The paper cups go.

When I struggle to get rid of the never-used baking ingredients, she steps in: “KonMari is about accepting where you are in life. You clearly want to bake, and that’s why you’re holding on all this.” She groups all the silly ingredients onto a pantry shelf and says, “Keep these with confidence. See over the next few weeks if you are a baker, and if it’s not who you are, then you can let them go.”

The baking ingredients stay.

Some things are easier to discard, like all the Moon Juice dusts I bought when I went through a Gwyneth Paltrow-inspired smoothie phase in 2016. Other things in the pantry are harder to say goodbye to, like some trays that were wedding gifts.

“Marie says gift-giving is about showing appreciation to someone, and people make the mistake of attaching that sentiment to the item itself,” Tselebidis coaches. “We’re trying to challenge you to think beyond the item. See the act of giving as the showcase for the appreciation, and then let go.”

The trays go.

When we get to my ridiculously large collection of Mason jars, I’m shocked to find I can’t let them go. I use them as vases and candleholders, and for the occasional homemade fancy cocktail, but I still can’t quite figure out why I have so many, and why it hurts to part with them.

“KonMari is not minimalism,” Tselebidis reminds me. “A lot of people think, ‘Oh, Marie wants you to throw out all of your stuff.’ That’s actually not true. We want you to be evaluating the things and keep what makes you happy, no matter the number. The jars clearly spark joy for you, so keep them!” I breathe a sigh of relief.

Tselebidis is playing therapist for me. When we get around to dumping pantry food that doesn’t spark joy, I start to panic.

“I’m Jewish and it’s against my religion to waste food,” I choke. “Also, my grandparents were Holocaust survivors and my family has always had a weird, sort of frantic relationship with food. I don’t think I can do this.”

“Don’t feel bad,” she responds. “Sometimes you have to have a huge shift in your life to see real change. This is leading you, ideally, into making better choices.”

Tons of half-open boxes of Manischewitz foods and expired pastas go.

By the end of our three-hour session, my pantry is perfect.

While I (or, rather, Vox) can’t pay Tselebidis for any more sessions, I’m suddenly inspired to Kondo my entire apartment, getting rid of the things I don’t like about myself and working on the things I do.

I decide to bake a cake this weekend, and be better about my diet. It’s unclear if those things will actually happen, but at least I get to hold on to all my Mason jars.