Megu / Blog / A Wardrobe Inventory for Insurance, Without a Spreadsheet
A Wardrobe Inventory for Insurance, Without a Spreadsheet
Nobody makes a wardrobe inventory for insurance until after the event that needed one. A digital closet is an inventory you make for a different reason and have anyway.
Why insurers want it
A contents claim after a fire, a flood or a burglary is settled on evidence of what you owned. Receipts are the gold standard and almost nobody has them for clothes. The next best thing is dated photographs of the items, ideally with a description. An inventory made after the loss, from memory, is what most people end up submitting, and it is always short.
What a digital closet gives you
- A photograph of every piece, taken while you owned it, which is the evidence that is hardest to reconstruct afterwards.
- A description: kind, colour, and often the brand and material, read from the photo by the app rather than typed by you.
- A count. "About forty shirts" is a guess; a grid with forty-three shirts in it is a number.
Some apps also let you record what you paid. Megu deliberately does not track prices, so if your policy needs values you will add those to the claim yourself; the photographs and descriptions are the part you cannot recreate later.
Making it usable for a claim
- Digitise the whole wardrobe, not just the working core. For daily use, stopping at forty is fine; for an inventory, keep going in later sessions until everything is in.
- Photograph labels for anything valuable. A second photo of the brand label and size, kept in your normal photo library, takes five seconds per piece.
- Keep the app's account in your own name and signed in. Cloud-backed closets survive the loss of the phone; a photo library that was only on the phone may not.
Check with your insurer
Policies differ in what they accept and in the limits per item and per category. A digital closet is evidence, not a valuation, and it does not replace a policy that covers what you own. Read the policy; then take the photographs, because the photographs are the part you cannot do afterwards.
Open your closet.
Megu photographs your clothes, polishes each piece into a studio shot, and has a look ready before you are out of bed. iPhone, iOS 18 or later, with a free trial.
Keep reading
- Digital Closet vs Spreadsheet vs Photo Album — Three ways to keep track of what you own, compared on the only measure that matters: whether you are still using it in a month.
- How to Digitise Your Closet in One Evening — A step-by-step method for photographing 30 to 40 pieces into a closet app in a single sitting, and why the order you do it in decides whether you finish.
- What Is a Digital Closet? A Plain Explanation — A digital closet is a photographed, tagged, searchable copy of the clothes you own. What it is, what it is not, and what it is actually for.