24 - All the Answers

I worked in retail for three years and I’ve been in wholesale for an additional eleven, and I’ve never worked for the guy selling the least expensive product. So when Kerry Mitchell, president of Addition-Elle and Penningtons, and I spoke, and she detailed the reasons why AE and Penningtons are not the guardians of the lowest price point, most of it wasn’t anything that I haven’t had to explain to my own customers before: “We don’t have the volume to be at the same price as the next guy; we offer services, that cost money, that won‘t be offered by the other guy; the specifications of my product are better than the one to which you’re comparing it--you have to compare apples to apples.” And on it goes. In much the same way, there were five major reasons that Mitchell outlined in her explanation for the pricing at AE and Penningtons. The first, was volume.

Despite the “growing epidemic of obesity” that will have us all dead by the end of next week, the plus size market in Canada, is still significantly smaller than the regular size one. In March of 2008, market research firm NPD Group, found that there had been significant growth in the women’s plus market in Canada, with one in five female shoppers purchasing in plus. However; that’s still only 20% of the market and NPD’s definition of plus starts at size 14. When I spoke with Mitchell, she defined plus as truly beginning at size 18. Both measures are true, but there is a compelling logic to Mitchell’s grouping, in that most women wearing 14/16 can shop at a wider variety of stores. They may not be able to shop at every regular size store out there, but they have a significantly greater number of choices than I do at a size 18/20.

The sheer dearth of plus retailers in Canada bears this out. The same report by NPD indicated that fully 57% of plus sales were done by the top ten retailers in the field. Unlike the US, where up to half of female consumers are size 14+, Canadian women are apparently still hitting the gym, eating right and smoking like chimney stacks to stay slim. With fewer customers to service and less product to purchase, pricing increases accordingly.

This made sense to me, but I still wanted to know why it was that Reitmans could offer such significantly lower prices than Addition-Elle to plus customers. Here I’ll remind you of that t-shirt that costs me $9.99 at Reitmans vs. $16.99 at Addition-Elle. To answer this question, Mitchell explained the second reason for the price discrepancies: the corporate structure of Reitmans Canada Ltd.

From where I’m standing, it seems perfectly logical to combine the purchasing power of AE, Penningtons and the Reitman’s Encore (plus) line, so as to lower costs across the board. Apparently, they don’t agree. Apart from maintaining the same corporate address, there is little else shared by AE/Penningtons and Reitmans; they are run as entirely separate entities, and thus purchasing volume is not shared. In effect, the much higher market penetration of Reitmans (at about twice the stores than either AE or Penningtons) can’t be utilized to lower purchasing costs for AE and Penningtons over all.

The next two reasons are fairly uncomplicated: amount and quality of fabric. While it’s clear to me that my size-18 garment is not significantly larger than a size 13/14 garment, I failed to take into account that a size-26 garment is larger. More fabric costs more money. As for quality, sometimes a price difference is reflective of a difference in quality.

Sometimes, however, a t-shirt is just a t-shirt, and in those cases, the grounds for the difference in price point might be about reason number five: branding. In large part, the different divisions of Reitmans Canada are run separately because their intended audiences differ. The marketing and branding diverges significantly because the customer differs. While AE and Penningtons are under the same division umbrella, even those stores are branded differently. As with all Penningtons stores, the one closest to where I live carries the MXM line (a trendier line of clothing), but most of the store caters to women 10-15 years my senior. The AE stores, on the other hand are going after a 35-40 year old woman.

Apart from demographic, there is also the concept of brand image and what the company is trying to convey—and if there’s one thing that the Addition-Elle brand is not trying to convey, it’s being the store with the lowest price. Believe me, I understand not trying to win the race to the bottom of pricing ladder; Wal-Mart will always be around for that. I just don’t know that I’m buying the image that Addition-Elle is selling. At first I thought this was just an issue of ineffective marketing, but I’ve come to believe that, even apart from my age, I’m not their intended customer.

I shop at AE for three reasons: I am a plus size, I like to dress reasonably well, and I like to have options. What is not included in these reasons is loyalty to the AE brand. When I think about shopping there, I know that the entire store is devoted to plus sizes, affording me options, and on a good day I’ll find a couple items that work for me. But I feel like the price point has always caused me to have a really ambivalent relationship with the brand and I suspect that a lot of younger women, who are not as financially secure as the intended demographic, might feel the same way. I still do as much shopping as I can in Reitmans Encore and I can honestly say that I feel a level of loyalty to the Reitmans brand.

I wondered aloud to Mitchell, during our conversation if, given the presence of younger customers who shop at AE out of necessity and lack of other options, that brand isn’t perhaps a bit narrow in its focus. I now wonder if it might be worth it to draw these younger shoppers in with slightly lower price points in order to garner a loyal customer, potentially for life. Kind of like all of us to whom McDonald’s was marketed when we were children. The food isn’t good—we’re just loyal.

And when I say lower the price points, I don’t mean slash and burn. I’m saying bring the $49.99 hoodie down to $39.99 and it brings it out of the realm of “too expensive for the brand” and into the realm of completely reasonable. Obviously the bottom line is profit, but I think, with a customer who shops in a store out of necessity rather than choice, it’s important to make the customer feel like they aren’t just being charged what the market will grudgingly bear; because if she can escape shopping there, she will. Having said all this, I don’t know how much weight each of the factors Mitchell outlined bring to bear on pricing, so I don’t know if there’s wiggle room at all**. I simply believe it‘s worth it for the marketing team behind the scenes to explore what drives customers like me to AE and Penningtons.

A few days after I wrote my initial letter, I was shopping at Addition-Elle and a girl in her early 20s was at the counter. She decided against buying some t-shirts that she couldn’t afford after experiencing a moment of sticker shock. The sales rep at the cash urged the young woman to buy the t-shirts anyway, but the rep’s urging lacked zeal. I suspect she saw in that customer a mirror image of herself, without the benefit of an employee discount.

**In rebuttal, Ms. Mitchell indicated that AE has lowered its prices in recent years and offers frequent generous promotions and sale pricing, but that due to the other factors mentioned earlier, the wiggle room is very limited.

20 - Fabulous: The New Fat

I’m sure you’ve noticed it. I have before today, but it really struck me this time. Recently I’ve been seeing an ad on the subways for Reitmans, a women’s clothing store that carries plus sizes. The woman in the picture is ostensibly plus sized. The copy next to her reads “Comes in small, medium and fabulous.”

I know I’m supposed to feel all special and empowered by this declaration of my fabulousness as a plus sized woman, but I just feel sort of condescended to.

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty has also used this particular trick. Some time ago they had billboards up around the city showing the image of a woman and two descriptive words. The public was invited to e-mail in their opinion of which word was more accurate. For example, one was a very freckled woman and the listed options were “ugly spots” or “beauty spots.” The options on the billboard I’m thinking of were “fat” or “fab.”

Understandably advertisers are not going to touch a word like fat, and all its negative connotations, with a ten foot pole, unless they are positioning it next to a more positive word—like fabulous. I get that it’ll probably be a while until we’re able to unpack a word like “fat” and allow it to just be a descriptor of size rather than an attack on character. It’s just odd that in a culture apparently suffering an epidemic of obesity we still can’t manage to find a way to talk about size that doesn’t make it feel like we’re avoiding swearing. Instead we’re busy re-claiming and disowning and doing everything in our power to avoid using the word fat.

The Reitmans ad verges on being confusing because the woman pictured is so very close to being a regular size. In fact, she very likely is a “regular” size. Barbara Brickner—one of the most famous plus size models in the industry—is a size 12. Whitney Thompson, winner of cycle 10 of America’s Next Top Model is considered a plus size model, and her size fluctuates between 8 and 10. I guess fair is fair—regular models are laughably unlike real women, so I guess the same goes for plus size models. My point is that the women used for plus size advertising are so normal looking if they’re not placed next to a “regular” model that it can actually be confusing. I wondered at first if the ad was just indicating that clothes at Reitmans also come in large or extra large. It took an extra second for me to make the connection that fabulous was a euphemism for plus.

As it is, fabulous is a word that has been squeezed of all its original meaning anyway. It seems to be the word people use when they want to describe a situation, item or person they actually find far from fabulous while still leaving everyone’s feelings intact. In fact, I’m sort of suspect of someone the minute they use the word. I start to immediately doubt their sincerity about everything that they say. And maybe that’s what I’m keying into in the ad. I don’t actually believe these advertisers think plus sized women are fabulous at all.

The Dove ads use the word in a different way. They clearly buy into all the bad connotations of the word fat because the woman pictured cannot apparently be fat and fabulous—she must be one or the other. Well frankly, given advertising beauty standards, she kind of has to be both. She’s a great looking woman who is quite well proportioned and bigger than average (at least for a model): fabulous and fat.

Both ads leave me with the impression of a sort of whitewash; a complete negation of fat people from advertising existence. We’ll either be acknowledged in euphemisms or not at all because apparently some of us can be too fabulous to even be fat. I’m pretty sure that I don’t fall into that category.

I’m not sure I’m ready for the word fat to be used in advertising. I think even I’m too painfully aware of all the baggage that word brings with it and I don’t know that I’d want to identify with an ad campaign that used the word. But it seems like fabulous doesn’t quite do the job either. Some clothing manufacturers have made an art form of referring to plus sizes and the advertising industry could probably get some pointers. I wouldn’t recommend all the things I’ve seen on clothing labels in my time—“Above Average” and “Encore” are some of the more amusing ones that come to mind—but there just has to be a better way. I mean, it would be nice if we could just say, “this clothing line comes in plus sizes” or “this woman is, incidentally, both fat and conventionally attractive (i.e. you don’t have a have a raging fat fetish to think she’s cute).” Clearly I’m not the person who should be writing this ad copy, but you get what I mean.

I’ve heard it said that advertising doesn’t set trends, it follows them and in these cases I think that rings true. As a culture we haven’t figured out a way to engage with fatness that isn’t mostly about dripping condescension, judgment or fetishism, and I think it might be a while before we do. It’d be nice though, if advertisers managed to get out ahead of the trend for once.