Online clothes retailing revolution?
Recently I wrote about the Gap’s European e-commerce website and mentioned one of the problems many of us have when buying clothes online, namely sizing and fit. There are of course other factors – such as not being able to touch the fabric or the colour rendering which can be quite off – so that clothes account for only 10% of online sales. But let me talk about sizing here.
Different retailers will use different measures for their sizes. In the US for example there are no standard sizes – an US 8 at the Gap may be an US 10 or 12 from Calvin Klein. In the UK, it’s the same: a UK 6 might mean different things to different brands. Moreover, in many countries, sizes are based on decades-old survey data which is hopelessly out of date, leading to badly fitting cuts that do not reflect current body shapes (in case you are wondering, we have grown bigger).
One reason sizes are all over the shop is the increase of so-called “vanity sizing”, where in order to make buyers feel good about themselves, the sizing has crept upwards (for example, an 8 today is a 10 of yesterday). This has been more true for women’s sizing, and seems also to apply more to mid- to low-end brands (for example, Calvin Klein sizes run to small compared to The Gap). The problem for the online buyer, is that there is a lot of uncertainty when a user buys online, as to what “kind” of sizing it is: true to size? Runs large? Runs small?
Some online retailers have helpfully added this information in their product description, which can help if you already know your size in general. But then again, if you know you are a UK 10 from the Gap, what does that mean for Jaeger, or Asos, or Miss Sixty? If you’ve never bought from these brands before, your guess is probably as good as mine. Even if you know (or think), say, the Gap tends to run large, you won’t know whether the other brand does too.
Many retailers also include sizing tables (incidentally, a Google images search for “clothing size conversion table” returns 842,000 hits…) but these also can be a problem: About.com’s table below shows “European” sizes, which is a good illustration of the problem: French, Italian and Danish all have different sizing conventions, none of which match…which is it here?
Even in the case of best practice retailers (the tables below are a good example) who provide garment measurements as well as extensive conversion tables with body measurements and photos of the clothes worn and laid out flat and provide the size clothes worn by the model and general fit information, it’s easy to get it wrong. There is still a fair amount of variability – you might be a Medium for tops and a Small for bottoms: how does that work out for a dress? In fact, when buying a particular brand with which you are familiar and from which you have already bought in the past, you may still find your usual size does not work for that particular item.
In terms of customer experience, if you receive an ill-fitting garment (especially if it’s too small even though it is “your” size) the result is frustration, disappointment, and the hassle of returns and/or exchange. So it was with some excitement that I read about a company, Fits.me working on a robot that could revolutionise the online clothes shopping experience. The device can replicate 2,000 body shapes, and once retailers have sent in their clothes they are “worn” in each size for each body shape. As a result, when you go to the retailer’s website, you enter your measurements and you are shown the image of your body shape wearing the item you are after.
How’s that for a revolution?