Next month SizeUSA will begin selling a report that correlates the volunteers' measurements with their income, age, gender, ethnicity and ZIP code, the clothing size they believe they wear, and other data. The report costs $20,000, but customers can use a query system to buy a few answers to specific questions for several hundred dollars. Most buyers are likely to be apparel companies, but there could also be interest from the aviation and automotive industries, which collect their own data, and makers of furniture and medical equipment.
Mr. Lovejoy would not disclose preliminary results, but he did drop one bombshell: of 4,000 women included in the survey, less than 10 percent met the definition of misses size 8 established by ASTM International, formerly the American Society for Testing and Materials, which develops standards through industry consensus for products, systems and services. Yet the fit of today's clothing is often still based on the notion that size 8 is closest to the midpoint of the size range of American women. Some companies, sensing that the standards are obsolete, have already moved the base line up to size 10. The sizing survey aims to substitute data for hunches.
"The basic message will probably be that we're changing shape," Mr. Lovejoy said. The nation's growing obesity has already been well noted, he said, but the report will yield actual measurements, breaking down the data into market segments. He said the data seemed to indicate that Americans have gotten taller as well as heavier, but weight is increasing faster than height, with the result that body proportions no longer fit size specifications set decades ago.
What's more, although the ASTM standards for women's sizes were refined in 1988 and 1990, they are based on data collected in 1941 and and do not reflect the nation's ethnic diversity. Efforts were made to recruit minority participants for the recent survey, resulting in a sample that was about 46 percent nonwhite.
The results could yield more predictable fits, provided that apparel companies abandon the growing practice of "vanity sizing," or purposely assigning lower numbers to sizes in order to flatter, say, a size 12 woman who finds she fits into size 10 pants.
The sizing survey could also revive interest in the original purpose for which the scanning technology was developed: to speed the manufacture and lower the price of custom-tailored clothing, thereby limiting returns and markdowns.
| Continue Marcia Beiderman's New York Times article "A Bulge in Misses 8? Digital Scanners Resize America"
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I think that the most telling data will be any correlations between income and size, and zipcode and size. I'm wagering that you will see larger people in the poorer demographics and zipcodes. (I think this data has already been found, but I am not sure.)
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