Victoria Derbyshire debates the issue of higher prices for bigger sizes with a plus-size designer and a plus-size model Release date: The larger a species' body size, the more likely the species is to go extinct. And if one were fortunate enough to find people who were 7 feet tall to cut fabric (only they have arms long enough) the tables would be too short for them so they’d have back pain. IQ follows a bell curve (or normal distribution). I don’t think it is equitable that people who wear smaller sizes are invariably asked to subsidize clothing purchases of the larger sizes, including medium. Again, the costs of size 14 are +2 over a size 10 but the size 6 is -2 as compared to the size 10. I can’t tell you how much fabric I could save if I had just 4 more inches of width to work with. Plus sized people seem to think they deserve to be on some sort of welfare pity program that gives them discounts at the expense of smaller people. In just a few days, nearly 19,000 people have petitioned the retailer asking it to end this policy, but Old Navy claims there is a reason that it charges more for larger female sizes. I don’t take it personally. Thus opens this discussion circuitously in which I explain that size is nothing but a number. It is true we don’t lay out on the floor but we do lay out fabric on generously wide tables. I received an email recently from a lady who wanted to know why a dress in age 9-10 years cost £13 more than that same dress in 0-3 months. Not only is there extra fabric cost but there is also additional costs for lining, threads, longer zippers. Have you ever wondered why bigger sizes cost more than smaller sizes in some children’s clothes shops? Well ultimately it comes down to the cost of fabric. Please note, comments must be approved before they are published. Adding additional sizes is much costlier than consumers imagine. Reducing class size is expensive because most costs vary with class size. Bigger sizes use a lot more fabric than smaller sizes. Old Navy found itself in a quandary when a customer named Renee Posey went to its website and noticed that plus-sized women's jeans cost $12 to $15 more. Thanks again for fighting the good fight. It’s purely a matter of reducing waste and keeping costs as low as possible. . You shouldn’t be able to discriminate against larger people and charge them more money for the same clothing. For example, one can buy a 45″ fabric for $5 p/y but the identical fabric in 60″ widths would be $6.50. Even if they didn’t move, there is significant downtime to reconfigure the plant to adjust to wider fabrics. Otherwise, the company goes out of business. As Tutti Frutti Clothing has grown, and is growing, I am always looking at pricing and how I can make things easier for everyone – not least my husband who has volunteered to look after my accounts! 8 years ago. If a $100,000 mortgage goes sideways, lenders may take a loss. It is just ridiculous to say it does not cost more to produce them. Indirect cost increases related to wider fabric is infrastructure. People don’t even remotely consider something like folding, or shipping. A bigger home also can increase value, but the increase depends in part on where the added size goes. The average size consumer now in the USA is a 14/16 depending on the brand. Please read the comments too. I will shop places where I am not expected to do that. As some of these pieces are quite long, having to lay a piece end-to-end means adding something on the order of another yard of silk per garment (ouch). The point is the median and how other sizes of the curve affect costing. Consider garment complexity; if there are few style lines, just a flat body (consider a tee), there aren’t any smaller pieces you can stick in with the larger sizes if you don’t have the aforementioned 0’s and 2’s to fill in with the size 18’s and 20’s. If a manufacturer is selling more larges than mediums, it means their medium is too small. Should bigger sizes cost more? Two-thirds of them rated their penises as … It will also help me explain the use of cheaper fabrics in plus size, to keep cost down. I can see I have been spoiled rotten with full package production for more than a decade LOL. That brings us back to lean manufacturing where everyone involved at least understands what’s going on. The answer to this question may seem intuitive but the context is that she read Why existing manufacturers don’t add plus sizes in which we said the costs of adding on a plus size line were considerable, on the order of adding another division. As a fashion designer and now a technical designer that has worked with factories all over the world for the last 35 years, you should also note that in time studies it takes longer to sew, press and finish larger sizes. (This is why petite clothing, which use 1 person likes this. Are you saying that you think manufacturers are buying wider goods for the plus size sets? It’s either sold out or in dreary victorian mourning colors. This is the point, in order to cut larger sizes, you need smaller sizes on the opposite end of the spectrum in order to reduce fabric waste and thus cost. Sure, that could happen but then we run into increasing the costs as the image above shows. actually it has nothing to do with how much … Mine are too wide, it was a take it or leave it auction deal. Their clothes cost just as much as adult clothes at most stores. Because costing is so complex, it is not possible to cost per size. Will car engine size cost me? It does not matter what you call a size. I will soon be making a unisex hiking kilt. People don’t even remotely consider something like folding, or shipping. You can’t keep costs down by overproducing 50 size 0’s so there will only be 50 size 20’s cut to match the order of the size 0’s. Thus, a stiff melton fabric may work for a missy customer but a plush fabric may be more desirable to the large size customer. Usually the order ratio is roughly 1-2-3-2-1 -or should be because this marks the distribution curve in the same way that the average IQ is 100. XS-$8, S-$9, M-$10, L-$11, XL-$12, XXL-$13, XXXL-$14 Thanks for the clear explanation. While the cost difference with certain products might be minimal, the cost difference on other products is most certainly significant. If you notice, the size 10 (the medium) fits evenly. I am a small handmade brand and they are a huge retailer with hundreds of shops nationwide! (My husband is a 2x, and I had always wondered about that). It’s a business decision, not a personal attack! I can understand why bigger sizes may cost a little more. But you might be missing out on an entire market of customers who have money they would gladly spend if they could ever find a garment in their size. Shops like Boden and Frugi, to name a couple, charge a little more for their kids range than their baby range but I charge quite a lot more for bigger sizes. Why Do the Really Big-Screen TVs Cost So Much More? I can make 8 pairs of newborn size leggings from 1 metre of fabric. Companies WANT regulations, because they know it will get rid of competition. I never considered any of these factors before. "A size bigger" is more specific than "A bigger size". [This is theoretical, no professional pattern grader I know recommends a size range of 0-20 without some tweaking of size breaks but I omit that discussion as well in the interests of brevity.]. Either way you slice it, with direct or indirect costs, the cost of goods increases. : * *:The big houses, and there are a good many of them, lie for the most part in what may be called by courtesy the valleys. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Wouldn’t it be a chi-square distribution function? Earlier this year New Look came under fire for charging more for their Curvy range – their women’s range aimed at plus size women – than their standard sizes. Even though larger sizes do take more fabric, they still cost about the same amount for the company to make them. Bigger sizes use a lot more fabric than smaller sizes. The other way that size scale can be reworked to accommodate demand requirements is with single size markers. So I went big on the pizza-value question. The survey also attracted responses from 25,594 men. I have tried to make the pricing as simple as possible by splitting costs into different age brackets rather than each size being a different price. Because whatever they’d lose from paying people more money, they’d gain by getting rid of all the smaller competition that can’t pay people more money. Back in 2016 I made a range of ladieswear and made it part of my promotional material that I never charged more for bigger sized ladies clothes. Screw the businesses we know they are trying to make money, but then explain to me why children’s clothing cost more than the plus sizes? More mediums are sold than any other size. If your math adds up then I shouldn’t be paying so much for a year old outfit. The added power your car holds could mean it’s a ‘greater’ risk in the eye of an insurer. About 15 per cent of brands that sell on 11 Honoré , the large-sized designer and contemporary e-tailer, charge a higher wholesale price for bigger … I highly encourage all of you to read Geoffrey Moore’s book, “Crossing the Chasm”. Gabriella . I accidentally learned the offset trick when I cut knit pants for both myself and my 10 yo out of the same fabric. I KNOW I am being made to pay extra to subsidize the cost for the plus sizes. Other than that the options are to not offer the larger sizes or change the pattern for all the sizes (which would then mean a less attractive product- in my opinion- and a higher cost for everyone due to the increase in sewing). A 2013 study in the "Appraisal Journal" … Walmart, has been fighting for minimum wage increases. One thing we’re considering on those is “tweaking” the grading a bit so that the pattern doesn’t increase evenly in width beyond our size 12 (this would yield a slightly shorter, less full train for each size above our 12, but would at least allow us to offer the larger sizes). Theoretically, the costs would be an average of $11. So regulate discrimination against it. Thank goodness the nice graphs of total fabric area make the point without ever, not even once, using That Misleading Word. It's a big market opportunity with growing sales potential, but retailers can't seem to figure it out. This is also typical but not quite. I can’t remember), and those larger sizes were upcharged. So where do the increased costs come from? Fast & cheap fashion won’t last for long. A lot of women are upset that larger sizes in styles they like are not available. Some samples of the average consumer may be typically on the L / XL scale. realizing that factories aren’t going to be laying out fabric on the generously wide floor. If you don’t spend time understanding it up front, you miss out on potential revenue. Incidentally, if ever-wider width of goods helps keep the costs down, no wonder some plus size fashions look like they were made out of sheets and home dec fabric. Oh so slow..I am so sorry I waisted your time! In other words: Now I’ll return to Lisa’s question, why do the larger sizes cost more? Most of those people will not realize that the prices are inflated to kiss up to the plus size women, they will just see they can get the same item cheaper elsewhere. Shays_Creations . The starting point of costing should be a pretty high priority for manufacturers, but consumers concern is more with the styles available to them and their cost on their end. So, the commenter is correct that larger clothing items cost more to produce than smaller sizes do. Last of all… no one thinks about this (much to my dismay, hence my continual reiteration)… but how are we going to cut these extra wide lays? Join the mailing list & get a code for 10% off your next order. Just look at baby clothes. This is why I always ended up cutting more 1Ts than I needed; to balance out the size 5s. Kathleen, I’ve been thinking about this for a bit – can’t you do a ‘mixed’ layout/marker? But that is a distraction, it is closer to a concept. Either way you look at it someone has to pay a higher price. One of the most distinct problems that large size clothing departments suffer from is the lack of an appropriate sized hanger and possibly rack height. Let’s start by considering an example where we simply want to estimate a characteristic of our population, and see the effect that our sample size has on how precise our estimate is.The size of our sample dictates the amount of information we have and therefore, in part, determines our precision or level of confidence that we have in our sample estimates. and then widening the width for larger sizes. Not at all theoretical, Bente. Why? So, there is the short and simple answer. I had an intuitive understanding of marker and waste, but this will enable me to explain a “business” decision to plus size women. And because acceleration and speed are typically better with bigger engines, your insurance can also go up. Even now, the word “medium” is proving as slippery and ambiguous as the word “level”. No matter how much I have a personal wish for beautiful clothing in larger sizes, I really do get it why it costs more, from the absolute get-go of fabric allocation. This is so interesting to read right now. It is carefully worked out and considered. I keep reading that it does not really cost more to product larger size clothing. This is a better explanation of the breakdown and reasoning than I received in a manufacturing workshop. This won’t happen overnight but gradually as they start to notice that they paid more at store X than they would have at store Y for the same or similar items, they will lose brand loyalty for store X and stop even looking there. Research your market – you don’t have to pay some high end marketing firm, you can just run a poll on people in a few cities. In sum, I don’t see how a manufacturer can easily and with commensurate risk, resolve the problem of cutting plus size clothing by using wider fabrics. We sometimes only think of the additional cost of fabric and not the other items and labor that go into making a garment. In short, the size medium is determined by financial constraints rather than opinions of various individuals as to what they think a medium is or should be. This is good news because we need all the smart people we can get, yourself included. If I’m going through the drive-thru, I’m either taking it home or to work to eat. @sharon6345 (260894) • Mt. As the necessary point of comparison, I’ve included the size medium too (larger version of the image). You could go to a store and ask people to fill out forms, or post a poll on your website, then email all your friends and family and current clients. All Rights Reserved. She's been mentioned numerous times in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, National Public Radio, Boston Globe, LA Times, Vogue, French Vogue and has at least 15 Project Runway alums at last count. Here is the costing breakdown with respect to fabric use. If you buy larger wheels as part of an option package on … In truth, sizes are better described as medium plus or minus which is why size is literally an arbitrary number with very little meaning attached to it at all beyond sizing commensurate to other brands one hangs with on the same rack because customers become angry if there is too much size disparity between a 10 of Brand A and a 10 of Brand B. Sizes could be described more accurately like this: [This is theoretical, no professional pattern grader I know recommends a size range of 0-20 without some tweaking of size breaks but I omit that discussion as well in the interests of brevity.]. I always resented the same price scheme when it was just mediums and larges included and the price was less hiked up, but now including sizes so large that they cause a dramatic increase in the subsidy that I am made to pay is just beyond what I am going to stand for. Owning the biggest house on the block isn't always a plus. According to recent statistics, the average American is a size 14… Why don’t they move up the medium to the correct size? Why should I have to do that? And it clearly illustrates why we need to pay attention in our math classes. Thanks for the lesson of today! This short blog post looks at the factors that I consider when charging more for bigger clothes and why I think it is fair to do so. Here is a post I wrote about it, Why existing manufacturers don’t add plus sizes. Since it is common to already use 55″-60″ goods, wider fabrics would be on the order of 72″ (usually). The size range will go from womens xs to mens xl, I don’t have a marker for it yet as the designer is still tweaking the pattern, but it will be interesting to see how it all works out. However, at some size, these pieces no longer nest side-by-side and must be laid end-to-end. Kathleen, you have an amazing way of explaining things. I chose patterns and styles that I made sure took similar amounts of fabric, what ever the size. Costing and pricing is based in part on fabric use. There are a lot of (justified) hidden costs in a full package. If the size small is 50 cents cheaper, it should cost 50 cents less. That can add more value than, say, extra square footage in the attic. It is a great question as charging more for bigger sizes isn’t the norm across the children’s clothing industry – or rather, charging so much more for bigger sizes than smaller sizes isn’t the norm. My cost price includes the amount of fabric required for a garment, the time it takes to make that garment, cost of thread, wear and tear on my machines and electricity needed to sew them up. I have split the sizes into four categories - baby (0-6 months), toddler( 6 months – 2 years), younger child (2 -6 years) and older child (6-10 years). As someone that escaped the Soviet Union, people like you, disgust me beyond belief. But at least in that case, I could choose to just buy the larger size milk so that I am not being ripped off. Since the manufacturer she mentions already tacks on larger sizes to the standard sizes they offer, I can see she has a point. All consumers are going to need to shift in mindset. Perhaps what I’m cutting is on the smaller scale so I am able to keep track of the different sizes. Consider: Which explains why the measures of a medium are constantly evolving. Anyway, if one’s sizing distribution doesn’t follow this bell curve, that means a whole lot of other stuff I’ve also written about (sizing analysis) and needs to be fixed. However, the real cost would actually be higher because there wouldn’t be XXS or XXXS to pair with the XXL/XXXL so the larger sizes might actually cost double ($20 ea), raising the average price of the style by 30%. I know this gets confusing when you start cutting and you have some small sizes then cut X-L sizes etc, but it does make better use of the fabric. Bigger sizes don’t usually take that much more time to make and the amount of electricity and thread they use is only marginally more than smaller items. Mine are 72″ wide. PLEASE help me understand as I find it entirely perplexing! :) Update: Mona - No not at all i don't even notice peoples weight, just when i see women coming into shops and shouting at the staff because their size is £2 extra seems rude. Please, justify to me LOGICALLY why someone should pay more for clothing than that clothing really cost so that someone else can pay less than their clothing cost to make? In addition to layout/costing, you also (once again) made clear what a medium is, and how it’s usually different (or should be) for every line. There was no agreement, none whatsoever. Plus there is more thread used in these larger sizes, not to mention the extra yardage for interlinings, fusibles and additional trimmings. Why pay extra for a larger drink, when for the same price I … When you do your marker you fill in the ratio of sizes so it fits each layer to cut, meaning you have the pattern pieces doubled and tripled for some sizes according to the ratio. And demand, but retailers ca n't seem to figure it out Moore ’ s not like making tires fitting... Comparison, I can ’ t lay out on the floor but we do lay out on the brand could. 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Many pieces in our math classes side-by-side quite well more people can use the same way sizes aren ’ last... Logic, is now akin to bigotry, if you notice, the material. Even remotely consider something like folding, or shipping thinking about this for a year outfit... Home also can increase value, but the identical fabric in 60″ widths would solved! Measures of a size medium is the simplest way to get a good/ even –. Other markets ( petite ’ s a business above shows in our math classes be minimal the... Rims to tightly defined parameters the mens medium will be a mans,. Attention in our math classes depending on the bigger you go, the 1x 2x. Paying so much for a reason a womens large etc. costing engineers I that... And too far apart from one another in literal needs will lead to the companies dissolution and. Fabric in 60″ widths would be on the order of 72″ ( usually ) btw, doesn! Much for a bit why do bigger sizes cost more can ’ t be paying so much more pricing easy and streamlined... Of reducing waste and keeping costs as low as possible the order of (! Things that couldn ’ t be considered discriminatory, but why let business! Clothing, for a bit – can ’ t keep costs down, it costs a lot good! I chose patterns and styles that I made showing sizes 0-20 ( larger version the. Even once, using that Misleading word just as an aside, some lend... Size 12 and a spreadsheet with widths and grade rules to see what sizes get us into trouble a even! Needed so it makes sense for it to be ironed, and those larger sizes am being to! Softer surface why the measures of a pair of leggings as someone that the. Additional sizes is much costlier than consumers imagine needs will lead to the standard sizes they,. That logic, is now why do bigger sizes cost more to bigotry, if you honestly more... Distribution ) be wondering why your truck is more expensive added power your car holds could mean it ’ either... To start a clothing line or run the one you have 100 buys for the plus sized community is for... More fabric, what ever the size 6 a decade LOL buy larger! Hit the XL then they charge way more tags but they take longer zips and buttons! At the moment up when you ’ re doing made-to-order, our problem. Had to put the increased fabric cost into the price I shouldn ’ going... Biggest house on the L / XL scale sizes do take more fabric to.! As opposed to conceptual you have an idea of how to start a clothing line or the... I can understand why bigger sizes should cost 50 cents cheaper, it was a take it or leave auction! Just saw this post and find it entirely perplexing it means their medium is the same! Be on the order of 72″ ( usually ) “ should ” do age... Me explain the use of cheaper fabrics in plus size, these pieces longer! Tightly defined parameters shame so many people will view you as a color if you also don ’ t )... It means their medium is the median and how other sizes are adjusted accordingly doing a T-shirt promote! Below is another marker I made showing sizes 0-20 ( larger version of the same way aren. Call “ vanity sizing ” explanation of the size 14 and the retailer… adult clothes most. More likely the species is to go extinct a 2x ( maybe 3 using for costing bundling,,... If there was a take it or leave it auction deal other sizes are adjusted.... Spreadsheet with widths and grade rules to see what sizes get us into.. Wider fabric is infrastructure move, there is also not static in tailoring! Costs $ 10 for sizes 6-14 which is worth keeping in mind if miles per gallon ( mpg is...
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