What Does "True to Size" Mean in Your Event Merchandise?

When you see apparel for sale, whether it's from a vendor like us or just clothes hanging on a rack at your local department store, there's a chance that you'll see the acronym TTS, or the full thing, True To Size, somewhere on the garment.

What does it mean?

The Definition of TTS

We already gave the game away; TTS stands for True To Size. But what does it mean for a garment to be true to size? True to size is, essentially, an industry standardization within the fashion industry.

The goal of TTS is to ensure that garments within a specific size category are, physically in terms of their dimensions, actually within that size category.

If you've ever bought a shirt in size L and found it felt the same size as an M shirt you have, or if your L is a lot closer to XL, you can see why this can be an issue.

Where Did True to Size Come From?

There are many different, often conflicting origin stories for the TTS concept. Some claim it originated in the broader fashion industry in the 50s and 60s. Others pin it on more recent e-commerce developments. The most likely, though, is that it comes from shoes.

When you shop for shoes, you likely see those metal contraptions made of rulers and slidey bits, meant to help you identify your shoe size. This is actually called a Brannock Device, and was first developed all the way back in the 20s.

This helped establish standard sizes for footwear, which we still see today. Whole sizes and half sizes are standard enough that if you're a size 8, it doesn't matter if you're getting shoes from Adidas, Nike, New Balance, Chanel, Gucci, or Louis Vuitton; they're all going to have the right size to fit you.

This is a good idea, and it expanded to garments over the years, especially as more mass production started to saturate the markets, and then doubly so when online shopping started to emerge. In the past, you could just get your garments tailored to fit you, but tailoring is a dying art outside of high-end fashion, and most apparel never sees the needle of a skilled cloth artisan.

There's just one problem. Unlike shoes, garments are much, much more variable, and brands never could decide on a consistent size chart. Multiple times since the 1900s, industry groups and even governments have attempted to set a standard, but none of them have truly succeeded.

Inconsistent Consistency

There are several significant elements that make True to Size less trustworthy than you might hope.

The first is size inflation over time. Over the past 40 years or so, sizing for apparel has been slowly creeping upwards, especially in the American markets. At first this was subtle, barely anything to mention, but over time, it has compounded. Now, what we call a Large might have been what earned the Extra Large label before.

This is broadly known as vanity sizing. Obesity is a global epidemic, and people feel bad about it. A shopper who tries a Large and doesn't fit might be hesitant to buy an XL garment because of the emotional implications; if they find another brand that offers a Large they do fit in, they're more likely to stick with that brand, buying oversized clothing, and reinforcing the sales value of exaggerating sizes for vanity purposes.

This means the consistency between sizes, even sizes that are True to Size, can vary between brands, and even within a single brand over the course of years. Something purchased five or ten years ago, and something purchased today, can be very different sizes even if they're the same labeled size.

The second significant element of TTS is international differences. Different countries and regions have different sizing conventions, sometimes established by local governments or industry groups and sometimes just established or agreed upon by the local dominant brands. These sizes may also have changed over time or not changed over time, leading to differences between them.

While the USA rarely sees these sizing differences directly, they're still obvious if you shop from international online retailers, where you'll often see a size chart including sizing for the USA, for the UK, and even for continental Europe, southeast Asia, or elsewhere. In Europe, meanwhile, an apparel shopper might see a chart with six or more different size conventions from different countries just in the EU.

A US size 8 might be a UK size 12, a French size 40, and an Italian size 44, and that depends on the brand. You can also add onto this the fact that a manufacturer of apparel in China or Vietnam might be using outdated size charts, or mistake a UK for a US chart, or use the chart for the wrong brand, and you never know what you're going to get.

Note that sometimes, for some kinds of apparel, there are different conventions that make things more standardized. Many brands selling men's pants, for example, don't use a flat sizing but rather a two-number system of measurements. A 28x30 pair of pants is a pair of pants with a waist circumference of 28 inches and an inseam measurement of 30 inches. A 28x30 will be the same size no matter what brand makes it. Unfortunately, women's pants don't share these measurements, and it's much harder to use such simple measurements for shirts and other kinds of garments.

The third reason is that there's a lot more to the fit of a garment than just the size, and it depends a lot on the garment. The stretchiness of the fabric, the weight of the weave, whether it's slim fit or loose, whether it's made for a male or female body type, and other factors all have a significant influence on the sizing of a piece of clothing.

When TTS Works

TTS may sound like a worthless statement, given everything we've written above, but it's not actually all that bad. It's just a tool that you need to know how to use.

The best time to use TTS is within the same brand. Sizing may vary from brand to brand, and it definitely varies from country to country, but it tends to be relatively static within a given brand. Vanity sizing can mean that brand sizing changes over the course of years, but as long as you aren't waiting 5-10 years in between purchases, you'll still be accurate enough.

TTS can also be useful just for broad generalities. It's a little less valuable when you're talking about products with narrowly defined size bans, but when you just have Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large to choose from, TTS can be a little more useful.

Bypassing TTS With Sizeless Apparel

One current push in fashion, at least from some corners, is a return to something a little less codified: sizeless apparel. The idea is that using modern technology, you can use a phone's camera or just your own information to measure yourself and use the measurements to shop with confidence. It means it doesn't matter whether a piece of apparel is a Small that runs large or a Large that runs small; all that matters is the measurements match.

So far, this is still quite limited. Relatively few brands provide the kind of specific measurement-based size information you need to match with your own measurements, and the apps that you can use to measure yourself may not be quite reliable enough yet. We haven't tested them or integrated this kind of technology ourselves, but it's certainly an interesting approach and could prove to be more useful in the coming decades.

Using TTS for Event Merchandise

Knowing what TTS means doesn't necessarily help you understand intuitively how to use it for your event merchandise, so let's talk about it in a bit closer detail.

First, know what kinds of sizes you need. Maybe you're ordering a hundred S, 150 M, 200 L, 150 XL, or whatever your scale needs. Having some idea of how many you need for each size category allows you to adjust later.

Second, investigate your suppliers. Apparel can either have no designation, a TTS designation, or can be labeled as "runs large" or "runs small." These latter two are generally mentioned in reviews and comments rather than in the description of a product because it's the real people making orders that have the comparison to decide. A company is less likely to admit that their apparel runs outside of the accepted range because that throws into question other aspects of their quality.

Once you think you have a supplier, order a couple of test items. You can do this immediately when you find the supplier, or you can wait until you've developed a design and want to see how it looks in print, so your test print pulls double duty. Once you have test items, you can compare it to other apparel you own, and see if it seems smaller, larger, or right on track.

This is perhaps the biggest tip: don't blindly trust any brand until you've bought from them before and can verify their descriptions. Otherwise, you never know if they're just operating on a different basis, using the wrong conversion chart, or simply lying, as some of the shadier, cheaper brands out there might do.

Once you know, you can then use the label on your marketing and answer questions if anyone asks. When you're handing out event merch, and someone asks if it's true to size, you know the answer… probably. That is, you don't know if that individual's true-to-size is the same as your tested true-to-size, but you can err on the side of caution either way.

Additional Questions About True to Size

There's still a bit more ground to cover about TTS in apparel, but it doesn't quite fit in other sections, so let's cover a few more details here.

Does a TTS garment mean it won't shrink? Not necessarily. True to size may mean the garment has been laundered and pre-shrunk and that the original design accounted for that shrinkage. Alternatively, it might mean the production is sized true, but once you wash it, shrinkage means it runs a little small. This can vary not just from brand to brand but also between apparel made of different materials; not all fabrics shrink the same way when washed.

Should you use TTS in your marketing? That's entirely up to you. Some people put a lot of stock in the true-to-size designation and might be hesitant to snag a piece of apparel from you if it's not true-to-size. On the other hand, others know that TTS itself is a crapshoot and might not put any stock in it anyway. And, of course, plenty of people might not even know what TTS means in the first place and just gamble with every apparel purchase they make.

How can you make your merchandise more reliable? For our money, the best option is a combination of size conventions, TTS, and actual measurements. Providing real measurements helps individual shoppers or recipients know, at least in broad strokes, whether or not a piece of apparel will fit. That makes it easier to know what you're getting and easier to validate simply by pulling out a measuring tape.

Where can you get excellent, customized event merchandise? Right here! Here at Ethix Merch, we take great pride in ethically producing, manufacturing, and fulfilling orders for customized, branded merchandise of all sorts. Whether it's t-shirts, jackets, sweatshirts, or non-apparel items, we have hundreds of options available to you. Moreover, we ensure full transparency with the production of every item we sell, with receipts. Feel free to ask us directly; we'd love to talk about it!

Whether you want to talk about the ethical production of our items, want our help making custom graphic design for your branded apparel, or just want to dig into the purpose of event merchandise, we'd love to hear from you!