| HN Mirror

I'm currently wearing Levis 514, which according to their website is a straight fit. In the past, I've also worn 527, which I guess is a boot cut? I don't wear skinny jeans because I can't get over the "skinny jeans = emo hipster" association that was made when my brain was still forming connections like that back in the 90s.

It's kind of a tough problem; I can tell you that my demand for jeans is pretty low, in large part because buying jeans is such a miserable experience. In the best case scenario, I get to go to an outlet mall and search through racks and racks of jeans; in the likely event that I can't find my size, I have to be a 26 year old man asking a salesperson where they have "Boys size 14" jeans. This has never failed to be humiliating, and I hate having to do it. As a result, I buy jeans four or five pairs at a time and wear them until they all fall apart; this means I never have to shop for jeans more than every four or five years, and it minimizes the amount of time I'm forced to engage in what has never failed to be a totally shitty experience [1].

As a result, I'll occasionally come across services like yours that advertise a revolution in jeans buying, and I'll think "oh hey, that sounds great! I hate buying jeans, maybe these guys have made it better" and invariable I discover that oh wait, they actually don't solve my problem. And then I figure, "Well, I've got another three years of jeans-time left before I need to worry about it, so whatever" and I forget about the service, because I don't have space in my brain to keep a record of all the companies that might, at some point in the vague, undetermined future, sell something that interests me.

It's something of an assumption, but I'm guessing that most of the 'Petite Adult Male' demographic is probably roughly like me; they've discovered that it's really un-fun to have to ask where the kid's clothes are when they shop, and so they minimize the number of times they have to shop. That minimizes the window of time for which they actually demand jeans, and that means it's very challenging for you to offer jeans for sale during the time in which they're attempting to buy them; you basically get one chance and if you don't have what they're looking for, they're lost as a customer forever.

I don't really have a solution for you; 27 inch waists are basically a weird edge case that I happen to fall into, and it appears to be entirely possible to flourish as a jeans company without selling them, so it's not like this is dooming your company to failure. You likely know more about the selling and marketing of clothes than I do, so maybe if I can give you some additional context into why that demographic is challenging to reach, you'll have some ideas?

[1]: One time, I tried to order 27x27 jeans online from the Levi's store. This was a horrible mistake that led to me having to send back no less than three different pairs of jeans that were random sizes with no relation to what I ordered, and each time it meant almost an hour on the telephone trying to make somebody understand that what I had ordered was 27x27 jeans and yet what I had received was 32x35 or 29x30 or 30x30, regardless of what their records indicated or what guarantees the previous phone call had left me with. It took literally a month and at the end of it I ended up having to buy the damn jeans in a store anyways.