The expensive one
Buying online without ordering three sizes
Why online clothes shopping produces so many returns, and what changes when the item can be seen on your own measurements.
Ordering three sizes to keep one is a rational response to a broken situation. Nobody does it because they enjoy it. They do it because there is no way to find out, and returns are free.
Except returns are not free. They are paid for in the price of everything, and a large share of returned clothing is never resold at all.
Why it goes wrong
What happens
The size label means nothing. The same nominal size differs by several centimetres between brands, and often between two items from the same brand.
What DROBE does
Your measurements, not a label. The garment is fitted to your proportions, so ‘will this fit’ stops being a guess.
What happens
The photograph is a different body. Longer, shorter, differently proportioned. A dress that falls at the knee on the model does not fall at the knee on you, and nothing on the page tells you where it will.
What DROBE does
It falls where it falls on your avatar, because the avatar is built from your body.
What happens
Increasingly, the photograph is not a body at all. Generated or heavily retouched imagery is now common. It shows a garment that has never been worn, on a person who does not exist, draped in a way fabric does not actually drape.
What DROBE does
A try-on rendered against real measurements is a different claim from a marketing image. It is not selling you the garment - it is answering whether it fits you.
What happens
Fit is not the same as size. Something can be exactly your size and still sit wrong: the rise, the shoulder, where the waist lands.
What DROBE does
You are looking at the whole garment on the whole body, which is the only place those show up.
What happens
You already own something almost identical, but you cannot check while standing in a checkout flow.
What DROBE does
Your wardrobe is a grid on the same phone. Four seconds to answer ‘do I already have this’.
What happens
It arrives and it is not the garment in the photograph. The dress that turns out to be entirely see-through is a genre of its own, and the product image gave no indication.
What DROBE does
Opacity is one of the things a render against a real body shows and a flat product shot does not. It is also the kind of fact that, once known, belongs on the item forever.
What happens
It arrives, it is fine, and you still never wear it - because it does not go with anything you own.
What DROBE does
Try it against the wardrobe rather than on its own. The question is not ‘is this nice’, it is ‘what does this go with’.
The honest limit
A try-on renders a garment on your proportions. It cannot tell you how the fabric feels, whether it is scratchy, whether it is well made, or whether the colour is exactly as photographed. It answers fit and it answers combination, which between them are most of why things get returned.