Selling Made-to-Order Clothing Online
By Bob Tedeschi

Buying a computer or airline ticket online is mainly a matter of convenience and price. But a pair of pants?

The typical retailer's response is to murmur a few discouraging words about "touch and feel" — a redundancy referring to the inability of customers to judge the product online fully. And online clothing sales have done nothing to combat such gloom. While online sales are expected to account for more than a quarter of the personal computers sold this year and about 13 percent of airline tickets, less than 2 percent of all apparel sales are expected to be handled online, according to Jupiter Media Metrix (news/quote). More vexing for e- merchants, perhaps, is that 30 percent of all apparel bought online will be returned, requiring a restocking or liquidation process that can ruin profit margins, according to retailers.

But the retailer Lands' End has high hopes for a new service it rolled out last week, enabling customers to buy $54 chinos that are made just for them. The service represents what could be the biggest customization effort to date for an online apparel retailer and, analysts said, the possible start of a trend within the category.

Users of the feature, which the company calls Lands' End Custom, are asked to type in a handful of measurements — like jacket size, weight and height for men, and height, weight and bra size for women — and also answer general questions about the proportions of their hips and thighs, among other things.

A software system determines a customer's weight distribution from this information and the trouser measurements conforming to it, then sends size specifications over the Internet to a factory in Mexico. The factory is equipped with computerized machines that cut the fabric for each order. Customers receive the pants directly from the factory, two to three weeks later.

According to Bill Bass, senior vice president of e-commerce and international sales for Lands' End, the new system has been in the works since December. "There were a lot of things to be worked out here — not the least of which was, would the sizing algorithms work?" he said.

For every women's size 12, Mr. Bass said, there are "several million variations" in the cut of the pants. With so many ways to go wrong then, "we did tests in April and May with about 1,500 of our current chino customers, and a vast majority of them said they would definitely recommend it to a friend."

Beyond the threshold issue of whether the system would work loomed the bigger problem of whether the custom tailoring could be done for a price that would attract customers and leave the company with a comfortable profit margin.

To ensure delivery within three weeks, Lands' End had to strike deals with new manufacturers in Mexico, rather than using its existing chino plants in Asia, Mr. Bass said. Aside from the cost of bringing two new plants on line, "it's simply more expensive to manufacture units of one than a thousand," he said. "Fortunately, with the technology we have in the process, those costs have come down."

Mr. Bass would not say how much it cost to produce each customized pair of pants, nor would he compare their profit margin to that of the company's noncustom chinos, which sell for $35 to $39.

But the profit margin per unit is only part of the equation.