Conviction in three lengths

So fun little fact (that wasn’t so fun at the time), but one of the earliest decisions we made about The Ginger was also one of the most expensive.

Early on I had done a lot of deep market and customer research and it was overwhelmingly clear that if we were going to commit to making the perfect go-to jumpsuit for women with full lives, it was going to have to come in three lengths.

Petite. Regular. Long. All in our very first production run.

And what that means is every additional length meant a different pattern, more samples, more inventory complexity, and more opportunities to get something wrong.

And that’s just a few of the reasons not to do it. I mean, I had advisors and industry experts telling me every week not to ship this with three lengths. To simplify out of the gate and “grow into it over time.”

But here’s the thing. I’m 5’1 (cough, cough… almost).

And I know what it feels like to find something you love, try it on, and immediately start calculating what has to happen before you can actually wear it.

Hem it. Shorten it. Take it somewhere. Pick it back up. Pay for the alteration on top of the thing you already bought.

And women on the other end of the height spectrum know the opposite frustration just as well.

Too short through the leg. Too short through the body. A rise that hits in the wrong place (always so uncomfortable). And unlike a hem, sometimes there simply isn’t more fabric to give you.

Come to find out this is a pretty huge problem. One study of petite women found that the majority had ready-to-wear clothing altered for better fit, and more than half of those women reported problems with garment length.

Which brings me back to the thing I could not get past: if the promise of The Ginger is ease, asking a huge group of women to visit a tailor before they can wear her felt like a pretty strange place to start.

No thanks, not for me.

So instead of treating one length as “standard” and everyone else as the exception, we made three. Petite. Regular. Long. Three starting points for three different bodies. All of them beautiful, and all of them deserving of their own Ginger.

And honestly, friends, it complicated almost everything behind the scenes. But it made the product simpler where it actually mattered. For her.

Sometimes building fewer, better things means making more complicated choices.

This was one of them, and I’d make it a hundred times over.

Cheers to building beautiful things,
Joanna