Size matters: Strategies for inclusivity and understanding your market

At any size, everyone deserves to have outdoor gear that keeps them moving. But size inclusivity in the outdoor industry sometimes leaves a lot to be desired. 

Digitizing your outdoor retail offerings provides everything you need for true size inclusivity: building customized catalogs, discovering what sells, and achieving better price parity across all ranges of sizing. Here’s how it can work when you use an effective solution.

Keys to Size Inclusivity with Better Market Understanding

Offering sizes of all ranges may sound inclusive enough. But to fully facilitate your buyers’ needs, you’ll have to get an even clearer picture of what you need to offer. Here are some of the keys to understanding size inclusivity for outdoor clothing and apparel buyers:

• Personalization is vital. If you’re truly selling inclusively, you need to be able to offer catalogs that personalize to everyone. After all, 74% of brands believe personalization is essential to their buyers. Using a wholesale tool like NuORDER, for example, can yield personalized linesheets with custom product assortments or even entire custom product catalogs. 

• Know your sell-through data. Sell-through data measures how many products you’ve moved through a specific period. With this knowledge on hand, you can answer all sorts of questions. What’s selling? What products are still on hand? How can you sell to retailers in a way that includes every size? Know what’s really selling and you’ll be ready to offer size inclusivity in the next period.

• What to do with customer data. Once you have a clearer understanding of your customer data, you can use it to meet buyer needs. For example, when we talk about digitizing a supply chain, you’ll use inventory data to help fuel insights into what buyers want most. Self-service features help you offer size inclusivity because they put the choices in the buyers’ hands. If you’re going to create a self-serve feature with your selling platform, you’ll need the customer and inventory data necessary to keep products available during self-serve buying.

Strategies for Incorporating What You’ve Learned

Good data is a great first step. But customers might not notice your efforts in size inclusivity until you’ve turned those insights into actionable steps. Let’s look at some examples of companies who have boosted size inclusivity with customer-facing strategies.

For starters, consider Arc’teryx. They recently underwent a redesign in its women’s gear to accommodate more body types. It’s not simply a matter of offering more sizing. They’ve moved products into numerical sizing rather than simply small, medium, and large. Expanding to this level of detail helps customers choose their own apparel with less guesswork and a greater sense of inclusion. It’s just a number, after all—not a judgment.

Another issue for people concerned about size inclusivity in outdoor wear: pricing. It’s one thing to offer a wide range of sizes. It’s another thing to make the pricing equitable. Columbia Sportswear has long offered a wide range of sizes, but its recent commitment to “pricing parity” is the first time the brand will offer these options at the same price.

Making Size Inclusivity Your Priority with NuORDER

It’s not enough to offer lots of sizes. True inclusivity means building a process of stable prices, a plethora of non-judgmental options, and adequate inventory to make sure everyone feels accommodated. And that starts with a platform that can facilitate it all.