I have difficulty buying suits. Apparently the ratio of my waist to my shoulders is a little off from the "standard". This results in a few problems that invariably cost me additional money.
My understanding is women have it a lot worse, and that it can be a challenge for many women to find clothes in stores at all.
I don't know how this is possible. Imagine going to a car dealer and not being able to fit into a car. Or to Chipotle and being unable to eat rice.
There are a few potential solutions. One is sites like etsy, or other ways of having clothes custom made. This need not be expensive, but it isn't a system-wide solution.
Instead, I'd to recommend a 2-sigma solution. Imagine a starting clothing company that has decided that 95% of the population will be able to find clothes off the rack. Assuming that the shape of the population is roughly normal, how would this be possible?
A few steps:
1. Take a sample of the population. Use about 385 individuals per sample, and try to reduce bias in the sample.
2. Measure everything about these folks. Inseam, waist, distance from waist to armpit, length of arm. Get the ratios. Figure everything out you need to make them clothes.
3. Repeat steps (1) and (2) a few times. Graph the points, and look for differences. From these multiple samples, create a 95% confidence interval.
Now you've measured a small sample of the population, and have a pretty decent interval measure. For optimal results, take measurements each season. Then not only do you know what clothes are needed, but you also know the changing shape of the population.
My guess is that I'm well within 2 sigma, and that many clothing stores simply do not cater to that wide of margins of the population.
The first company to do so should make a killing. The second to do so is liable to kill the first.
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There are 2 ways I think a company might go about accomplishing this: design clothes in a more 1-size-fits-all fashion, or provide a combinatoric-ly huge number of sizes.
ReplyDeleteYou've essentially proposed a shipping company that will provide boxes to fit 95% of the sized or shaped things you bring them, with no rattling. Certainly there are smart and stupid ways to do this, depending on how much effort you take at the beginning (like you say) to measure the population. But I still think you're either going to end up with giving people bags of air to take up extra space in the box, or providing tons and tons of different boxes to choose from, and packing experts to help people figure out what they need.
Katie: I admit there is potential for this not to work. Possibly there are several independent variables and no good way to fit the correlated population without selling sacks of air.
ReplyDeleteBut, if the necessary measurements of clothing is controlled by a few number of variables, we may be able to collapse it to one (ie, the population) without resorting to empty sacks.
Either way, the question can be answered empirically fairly easily.