Bloomberg: Retailers have a plus-size problem.
January 07, 2018
Retailers have a plus-size problem.
Clothing retailers across the board are struggling to grow sales as shoppers spend more of their money on electronics and experiences, rather than on threads. So you'd think, faced with a $20 billion market opportunity in a category outpacing the overall industry, retailers would be eager to jump on board. Not exactly.
Annual U.S. sales of women's plus-size apparel, often defined as a "Misses" size 14 and higher, rose by 17 percent to $20.4 billion in 2016, from $17.4 billion in 2013. During that time, overall apparel sales increased by 7 percent, according to NPD Group.
Customer demand could push sales of plus-size clothing even higher -- if only retailers would fully embrace the category, NPD analyst Marshal Cohen told Gadfly.
Instead, plus-size fashion tends to yo-yo at department stores and other mainstream retailers, Cohen said. They trot out a new designer or plus-size line with much fanfare, only to kill or shrink the line later when the economy turns south or they shift focus. That turns off shoppers looking for plus-size clothing and nudges them to stop coming to that retailer for shoes, jewelry, and other accessories, too.
This fickle attitude has driven plus-size shoppers to e-commerce sites -- where there's more variety and consistency -- at a faster rate than other shoppers, James Rhee, CEO of plus-size retailer Ashley Stewart, told Gadfly. It's also helping attract new customers to specialty stores such as Ashley Stewart: The company's website now brings in a third of its revenue, up from nothing in 2011.
It's not that traditional department stores and clothing chains don't offer dresses, shirts and other clothing in plus sizes -- out of the 25 largest clothing retailers by revenue, all but four have some plus-size options. It's just that their offerings are more limited than the ones in the so-called straight sizes.
For instance, a recent search revealed about 16 percent of dresses on J.C. Penney's website are plus-size. That number falls to 8.5 percent on Nordstrom.com. Nike has only five items on its website in plus sizes, and a search for "plus size" on Under Armour's website reveals a landing page that says "Sorry, we're currently working on more gear in this category." Plus-size offerings can be even harder to find in retailers' physical stores, which typically stock fewer items and have less variety than e-commerce sites.
It's hard to determine the exact percentage of American women who wear plus sizes, but the number is growing.
The average American woman now wears between a Misses size 16 to 18, according to new research from Washington State University assistant professor Deborah Christel, which is currently under peer review. Christel and her co-author, Susan Dunn, dispel a commonly-touted figure that the average American woman is a size 14, which they say is derived from 20-year-old data. Retailers such as Ashley Stewart and J.C. Penney have recently added sizes beyond the traditional 14 to 26, in some cases going up to 32. "Within six weeks of offering extended sizes this spring, we sold out," Ashley Stewart's Rhee said.
And while clothing size doesn't exactly track with weight, the percentage of women in the U.S. that are overweight or obese, based on their body mass index, increased to 66 percent in 2014, up from 51 percent in 1994.
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