Thursday’s New York Times had an article about scanning people to produce a database of sizes and measurements for clothing manufacturers. I hadn’t thought about sizes much until starting tortfeasor. People are always emailing me asking what size shirt they should buy. Isn’t the buyer in a better position to figure this out?

People come in all different shapes, and I’ve never understood why women’s clothes use arbitrary “size” measurements instead of actual inches or centimeters.

I think t-shirts are fairly standard across brands in terms of sizes though. I always ask for a large shirt, but an XL suits me just fine too. When setting up tortfeasor, I assumed that “large” was the average size and I printed an approximate bell curve of sizes. The first two orders (to a couple friends) were for a small and XXL shirt. Luckily, purchases did converge on large, but the extremities (small and XXL) do sell better than I thought they would.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon lately about the XXL shirts (currently sold out, but a new run should be printed very soon). I used to charge more for XXL because they cost more to make (more material), but it got somewhat complicated. In the process of raising all the prices a little and reducing shipping prices, I set all sizes to the same (increased) price. XXL sales immediately surged despite being more expensive than before. Another interesting fact: people tend to buy more than one XXL shirt at a time. Most of the recent XXL sales have been for two (sometimes more) shirts.