As a size 16 in Omaha, Nebraska, Hannah Olson often found herself with no other choice than to sew her own clothing in high school. There weren't any plus-size boutiques in her area, and the things that did fit her at local department stores were much too frumpy for a stylish teenager.
Blogger Gabi Gregg has launched her own plus-size swimwear line.
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She taught herself how to sew and used online resources like Pinterest to learn more complicated skills. When family and friends began to make personal requests for custom pieces, Olson started her own fashion line, Hannah Caroline Couture.
The 19-year-old is now a junior at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. On the side, she runs her company as an e-commerce venture and fills orders for proms and weddings; she estimates she makes around four pieces a month. She is taking business classes at school in hopes of figuring out how to build a profitable business that can exist long-term.
Models and bloggers at Pulp Fashion Week, a plus-size event in Paris.
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"There really aren't options for a girl like me in the plus-size areas of department stores, but I don’t think the industry is waiting any longer for traditional stores to carry the clothes we want," Olson says of her experience as a plus-size consumer. "These days, we go straight to the designer where we can build relationships and get better deals online."
And as a designer, she puts it this way: "It isn't necessarily a bad thing that department stores aren’t going to discover a line like mine because the need is there, whether or not they see it. I’d rather work directly with my customers."
When anyone talks about the plus-size fashion industry—designated as size 14 and up—the first thing that’s mentioned is opportunity. The market is valued at $17 billion, NPD chief analyst Marshal Cohen notes, though it's actually closer to $18 billion when the juniors segment is factored in.
But with the market’s prospects come plenty of shortcomings. Many plus-size women feel misrepresented and even disrespected when they shop for clothing. Despite the fact that 65 percent of American women are considered plus-size, plus-size fashion is still considered a niche market and treated as such by traditional retailers.
Trend-focused stores like Zara, Intermix, American Apparel, and Urban Outfitters don’t carry plus-size clothing, while Forever 21 and H&M offer just a tiny portion of their ranges in larger sizes. Department stores often also have sad excuses for plus-size sections.
"Plus-size has never been given respect," notes Sarah Conley, a 32-year-old plus-size fashion blogger living in New York City. "The clothing is always shoved next to maternity or sale, and is often moved around stores to make room for seasonal or beachwear. Even a store like Nordstrom, that is known to carry lots of plus-size lines, doesn’t carry options at all their locations."
Target launched plus-size label Ava & Viv earlier this year.
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The tide is turning, albeit slowly, with certain retailers giving the plus-size industry more thought in recent years. ModCloth expanded into plus-size in 2012, Target launched its own plus-size line Ava & Viv earlier this year, and J.C. Penney started making a lookbook for plus-size shoppers a few months ago. Despite these strides, plus-size insiders are far from satisfied.
"I made it to Target a few weeks after the Ava & Viv line launched, and it was just so sad," says Pamela Nanton, a designer who started her own plus-size brand, Ply Apparel, a year and a half ago. "The stuff looked great and sold out at first, but a few weeks later, it was just folded on tables and wasn't out on display. These are little jabs to the customer. Stores need to start doing these things with more thoughtful execution."
It’s for this reason that a crop of independent plus-size businesses have risen to the occasion. Last year, former employees of The Limited took over Eloquii (which the company had shut down) to transform it into a freestanding brand. Gabi Gregg, the blogger behind GabiFresh, launched her own swimsuit line, while blogger Tanesha Awasthi debuted a fashion-forward label on her site, Girl With Curves. Former model and blogger Aimee Cheshire started an online plus-size boutique, Hey Gorgeous, in 2013, and designer Ayanna Wu received lots of attention last month after launching her minimalist brand, Mei Smith. As Cohen of NPD explains, "How many times can a customer be insulted by the same store before they decide they want to give their business to people that actually put them first?"
Gregg has just released her third swimwear collection, and while several e-commerce businesses reached out to her (she currently sells it on Swimsuits for All), she has never been contacted by legacy retailers. She assumes this is because her suits are deemed too bold by conservative stores that still assume plus-size women want to cover up at the beach. This doesn’t bother her, she says, because she never needed those places to succeed in the first place.
"I’m planning on starting my own fashion line eventually, and it’s only going to be e-commerce," she says. "People always ask what stores my bikinis are in, and when I say none, they think they must not be good enough to be stocked in stores. But as a business decision, it just makes more sense to go straight for e-commerce."
A model walks the runway at a FullBeauty party.
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Many designers are creating their own websites equipped with small e-commerce operations to sell their clothing. There are also sites like Hey Gorgeous and FullBeauty that stock a variety of indie labels, though these kinds of multi-brand retailers are few and far between.
Read more at Racked.