Survey says . . . size issues are still a nightmare!

Survey says . . . size issues are still a nightmare!

I know some of you love a good bar chart, so here are these years; size data from a survey about 600 of you have answered so far. As I said on The Lingerie Addict a while back, getting hold of size data can be nightmarishly hard as most companies either pay a fortune from professional services, or do their own and then keep it very, very secret.

There are massive limitations to KMD data as it's only from people who happened to see our survey. Almost all of those were people who had bought from us at some point; its a horribly biased and completely unscientific sample.

Sizing is people's biggest issue with buying, leading to this sort of problem:

 

 

This is the kind of feedback that makes me cry. And then plan on putting detailed size specs on each individual garment.

 

Here's how you all filed yourselves size-wise:

As usual it's a skewed distribution, which means the mean (average) is different to the mode (most commonly worn size). I have a horrible suspicion that this is true for many brands customers, and it may be one of the reasons plus size fashion gets short short shrift and small brands just do 10/12/14. Anyone under a size 8 or much over 18 is badly served by us. Equally, a lack of good plus size styles means plus size customers stop looking...

Meanwhile, more than 25% of people don't fit into our current bra sizes, even the extended range we did just before the economic crash. Why don't we make more bra sizes? Because when we ask about more sizes, the chart becomes unworkable. That 25% is spread very thinly over many sizes - a manufacturing nightmare, even assuming we're all defining sizes the same way, which is certainly not a given.

And that's without including the full range of something like 430 sizes that Ewa Michalak do :) But they have their own factory... does anyone want to buy me a factory? No? Oh well. It was worth asking!

Some of you are MUCH better statisticians than me, so as always, just pop in any comments or queries and I'll do my best to answer!