Three days into an ambitious challenge to wear only charity clothes for a year, Caroline Jones thought to herself, "what have I done?". It was 3 January 2015. Her mother had died from breast cancer six weeks earlier and she had decided to raise money for Cancer Research UK (CRUK) in a year-long challenge which - to reflect the fact that only her underwear was new - she called Knickers Model's Own .
A volunteer at her local Harpenden CRUK shop, the then 46-year-old committed to finding different looks from the charity's shops every day of the year and post her outfits on social media. But in those first weeks and still in the early stages of grief, she was beginning to have regrets. "I remember thinking actually I don't think I want to do this for a year now, how do I get out of it?," she said.
"I remember going onto my Just Giving page and trying to extract myself from it. "About 10 days in, I had raised £35." Then everything changed.
Her campaign was noticed by the BBC and everything snowballed. Other media started calling and a couple of days later, 97,000 people had visited her Facebook page. The campaign caught the public's imagination and she raised about £70,000 from donations, proceeds from a sale of the clothes and from her book, A Year of Frugal Fashion.
She now calls 2015 "life-changing" but first she had to reflect on exactly what she had done. Creating content every day was a relatively new concept but she connected with her audience, who she describes as a "con.
