Buying, Trying and Sizing

The traditional paradigm of apparel purchase has been to try and then buy. You visit a retail store, pick what you like, try them out in the store’s dressing rooms and then buy a subset. In this paradigm, it is okay for sizing to not be standardised, since how the garment actually fits on you plays a larger part in your decision making than how it is supposed to fit on you.

With the coming of online retail, however, this paradigm is being reversed, since here you first buy, and then try, and then return the garment if it doesn’t fit properly. This time, the transaction cost of returning a garment is much higher than in the offline retail case.

So I hope that with online retail gaining currency in apparel purchase, manufacturers will start paying more attention to standardised sizing, and make sure that a garment’s dimensions are exactly what is mentioned on the online retailer’s site.

The question is who should take the lead on enforcing this. It cannot be the manufacturer, for had they been concerned already about standardised sizing, they would’ve implemented it already. So far the retailer has only been an intermediary (a “pipe”, as Sangeet would put it).

However, with the transaction cost of failed transactions being borne by the retailers, and these transaction costs being rather high in online retail, I expect the likes of Amazon and Myntra to take the lead in ensuring that sizing is standardised, perhaps by pushing up the ease of search of garments from manufacturers who already practice such sizing (these retailers have sufficient data to measure this easily).

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Given history, I don’t expect retailers to collaborate in coming up this a standard. So assuming each major online retailer comes up with its own standard, the question is if it will start off being uniform or if it will converge to a common standard over time.

I also wonder if the lead in standardising sizes will be taken by private brands of the online retailers, since they have the most skin in the game in terms of costs, before other manufacturers will follow suit.

In any case, I trust that soon (how “soon” that soon is is questionable) I’ll be able to just look at the stated sizing on a garment and buy it (if it’s of my liking) without wondering how well it’ll fit me.

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