What if we ended up with a system where I know I'm a B29.

Then after every shirt made, it's tested against the B26 - B34 (since it's probably somewhere in there) and then labelled as a fit for B29.

Then I just go shopping for B29s.

You'd be mapping a multi-dimensional space to a single dimensional one, which might work, but would probably be less intuitive. In the very least, we'd probably want something like a small/medium/large, then some extra info about the shoulders, and then a little bit more info for guys who want a tight fit (those guys with abs to show off). You could map those all on to 26-34, but I think it would not really help much.

This is also a male / female -type body distinction.

I'd argue men have about 4 primary body shapes (roughly, height:shoulders:waist:hips), within which most are +/- a bit.

Women have... a lot more.

Yeah. I implicitly assumed we were talking about guys because the idea of simplifying women's sizes just seems intractable.

"Sorry, B29 is a mild outlier in terms of sizing - only 5% of the population wears B29 so we don't keep that in stock."

I had this problem when I was younger with an outlier waist/inseam ratio. I was only one inseam size out of "normal" but had to catalog order my pants. I wonder how it would work now with modern supply chain efficiencies. Back then I could rely on a warehouse somewhere having my size, but just-in-time may not allow room for that.

I love the idea though. As someone who rarely finds a t-shirt where I like the fit (either too tight or too long), I'd love to just have something I could count on. I can't even rely on just getting the same size from the same store each time.

If we got away from factory clothes and moved to a model where someone made two or three year's worth of clothes for $500 (well I guess the price would be based on your packages??)

Then the clothing designer would input B29 and it would adjust all sorts of things and print out a pattern. Then the clothing designer could "test fit" the final shirt on a really cool adjustomatic mannequin made of weird pistons and balloons. Ok that last part is unlikely to happen but it sounds awesome.

> If we got away from factory clothes and moved to a model where someone made two or three year's worth of clothes for $500

Lovely idea but what do the poor fools do whose weights are going up and down? I mean I know that's not 80% of the population on a given year but there is some value to being able to buy just a few garments at a time that fit approximately correctly right now, even if they won't really in another six months.

Maybe Etsy, or re-seller sites that have used clothing.

Assuming B29 is a series of measurements, this is the right solution in my opinion. The challenge is the cost of measuring and tagging every item after production. The relationship to model out is cost of pre-measuring every garment vs cost of returns. If you could dramatically lower your return rate you may be able to be more profitable measuring every garment. But... even measuring successfully presents challenges.

Going in to a store would seem absolutely insane if you could just order tons of stuff in your size and it all fits and you would not have to make returns.

As someone totally ignorant of this industry... how can those problems be fixed? Is it an issue of using higher quality materials, or some factory process change?

Inexpensive, quality of construction, reliable sizing.

Pick two.