Shopping for clothes as a woman is hard enough. Sizes vary from store to store. But when you’re someone who wears plus-sized clothes, shopping can be a complete nightmare.
Not only do you have to compete with the varying sizes, but there is the added embarrassment of getting shuffled away to a far corner of the store. Many times, stores will keep their plus-sized clothes separate from their other items. It can feel like you’re being excluded, and that is never a nice feeling.
But Old Navy seems to be putting an end to that with their new store layout. Rather than keeping its plus-sized items separate from the rest of its products, it will now be selling all its clothing together.
This means the sizes will range from 0 to 30. Not only will everything be together in the clothing section, but you can also expect to see changes to the mannequins. All mannequins will be appropriately sized and will be properly showing the varying sizes from four to twelve to eighteen, etc. All the new changes will be hung up on signs in-store in order to let shoppers know what to expect.
You can expect similar changes online where all plus-sized clothes will be merged beneath one navigation menu.
The changes are quite different from how the store had previously done things. Old Navy has carried plus-size clothing sizes 16 and larger since 2004. But in 2018, they introduced a specialized plus-sized shop in 75 different stores. However, that didn’t go down very well as the plus-sized women’s clothes were being sold for more than their smaller-sized counterparts. Some suggested it was because of higher manufacturing costs due to more fabric being used, but Old Navy wasn’t up-charging for men’s plus-sized clothing – only women’s. It led to almost 100,000 people signing the Change.org petition in hopes of ending Old Navy’s “discriminatory pricing practices.”
Then, in 2019, Old Navy started testing out how it would be to sell all sizes together in one vicinity. According to News 7, Alison Partridge Stickney, head of women’s merchandising at Old Navy, stated, “This is a big change in the way we work. We had a team that managed our women’s business and a team that managed our plus business. So that meant merchandising, design, production.”
CBS News reported that the managing director at GlobalData Retail, Neil Saunders, added, “It is especially lucrative for a retailer like Old Navy which has a broad spectrum of consumers of all shapes and body types. For Old Navy and other mainstream players, I think they see an opportunity for growth in a part of the market that they don’t serve too well.”
What do you think of the changes made? Let us know!