sizing

This morning, my good friend pointed me to a very exciting development in online shopping.

One of my favorite brands; Express, has recently (seemingly about the beginning of this month) launched an interactive section to their website. Users can now comment on individual garments, leaving general thoughts, their age, how frequently they shop at Express, a rating, and most interesting of all: sizing information:

It’s nothing crazy yet; users can simply indicate whether the size runs very small, small, true to size, large, or very large. It’s not a very scientific system, but with enough users, it could be really exciting.

Some suggestions:

• Allow reviewers to input the size of garment they purchased. For sensitivity/privacy, this does not have to be displayed, but one should be able to filter to see people who bought the same size you plan to buy.
• Similarly, allow (but do not require) users to input basic measurements; height, weight, chest diameter, waist, inseam, etc. The fear that this will not be done accurately is, I think, largely unfounded since the people who take the time to do it will be the ones who do it right. Imagine seeing how people who are 6’3″ with a 33″ waist and 35″ inseam think about how the clothes fit. Very, very useful.
• If the above is done; allow a new user to enter their size information and be brought to a list of items (and associated sizes) that similarly built people found to fit well and rated highly.

Certainly an interesting infrastructure being built. It’s not just about helping people get the right sizes, it’s also about involving customers in the brand. People love to be involved and feel like they are contributing (notice, in the above picture, the “Top 25 Contributor” badge; great touch).

Glad to see Express taking advantage of today’s tools; hopefully it’s part of a continually improving campaign.

-Barry

Recently, I came across an article through my daily blog reading, reporting that a large fashion company, Asda, is launching a line of denim which includes odd-numbered sizes (…11, 12, 13, 14, 15…) instead of just the standard even numbers (…12,14,16…).

From a business perspective, this makes a lot of sense, especially since so few other women’s fashion companies are doing the same thing. Asda gets the publicity for being “first,” and people are going to talk about it (the fact that I’m reporting this news now third-hand, and some of you may be reporting it fourth-hand is good evidence of that). Further, everyone wants their jeans to fit well (if not perfectly), and making smaller distinctions between sizes is mathematically guaranteed to increase the number of people who will find a good fit, making it more likely that customers will purchase from you.

For the consumer, this is welcome news as well. At Asda, you now have more fit options, and it’s likely that some form of this increased granularity will spread to other brands and companies. Fit is one of the most important parts of fashion, and this unquestionably improves your opportunity to get well-fitting jeans. Even more, changes such as this one open the door for continued change in fit and sizing, which we should not be complacent in pushing for.

What else needs changing/improvement?

The female sizing system is irrationally based on a non-standardized set of integers (00, 0, 1, 2, …). As many women have experienced, someone can be an 8 at one store, a 10 at another, and a 14 at a third. Even within the same store sizing can vary widely across garments, beyond the reasonable differences in cut and style. Compare this to the better (but not perfect) male sizing system which is based on measurements (waist and inseam).

I’ve noticed that the higher-end clothiers are usually more explicit about their sizing, offering neck sizes, chest sizes and sleeve sizes in shirts, for example. On the other end, low-end department stores will often sell shirts, polos, belts, and even pants in letter-based sizes (S,M,L,XL,…). This makes it difficult to retain fit information across brands and stores, and means we often have to search for great fits (not that they don’t exist, some of my best fitting t-shirts come from a brand stocked at Kohl’s, but it was pure serendipity that I found them).

Instead, we should press for detailed sizing information, with a series of standard measurements that must be reported on all clothing. This would eliminate ambiguity, and make it very straightforward for people to find good fits; once they owned some clothing that fit well, it would be easy to find more (and could even be done safely without fitting rooms, over the internet even). A company that leads the way in this department will gain two things; first-in-the-market advantage, and control of the standardization system. The additional effort is theoretically small, which makes me wonder why someone hasn’t done it already.

-III