This section tests everything it recommends, which means it also rejects a great deal, and almost none of that ever gets written up. Over four months we returned eleven items. Setting them side by side turned out to be more useful than any of the recommendations, because the failures cluster far more tightly than the successes do.
Four categories of failure
Everything we sent back fell into four groups: garments that could not be worn with a bag, garments with pockets that did not hold anything, garments that pilled or bubbled within three wears, and garments where the size on the label bore no relation to the measurements. Nine of eleven were identifiable within ten seconds of unwrapping.
Photography is doing a lot of the damage. Two of the eleven were genuinely well made and simply looked nothing like their listing images, which had been shot with the garment pinned at the back — a standard practice that makes almost anything hang beautifully and tells the buyer nothing whatsoever.
The bag problem is the most common and the least discussed. A cropped or heavily structured jacket that rides up under a shoulder strap is unwearable for anybody who carries anything, which is nearly everybody. It never shows in a product photograph and it is obvious within about a minute of putting it on with your actual belongings.
“Try it on with the bag you actually carry. That alone would prevent half of all returns.”
A returns manager at a UK retailer
What the returns cost
Returns are not free even where they are advertised as free. Each one involves two delivery journeys and a repack, and a meaningful proportion of returned clothing is never resold at full price. Retailers price this in, which means the cost sits in what everybody pays, including the people who never return anything.
The most effective thing we changed was ordering behaviour rather than shopping habits. Buying one size rather than two, after checking published flat measurements, cut our own return rate by more than half over the period. It is slower, it occasionally means a second order, and it is unambiguously the better system.
The things we kept that we should not have
Returns are only half the picture. The more revealing category is what we kept and then never wore, and over four months that was five items — more than we sent back. In every case the reason was the same: the garment was good, we could not fault it specifically, and it simply never got chosen on any given morning. That is a harder failure to write about and a much more common one.
The pattern across all five was that each required a decision. Something that only works with one other thing, or needs the right weather, or has to be styled, competes badly against a garment that can be put on without thought. If you want a single predictor of whether something will actually be worn, it is not quality or fit but whether wearing it requires you to plan.
We would encourage more of this generally. If a shopping section never publishes its misses, its recommendations are unfalsifiable, and a reader has no way of calibrating how seriously to take them. Eleven returns and five unworn keepers out of a season is roughly our normal rate, and we would rather print it than have anybody assume we get this right every time.
We will keep publishing these. A shopping section that only ever prints successes is not a guide, it is a catalogue, and the failures are where nearly all the transferable information is.
