Extending Your Size Range Without Wrecking Your Inventory
By The Velocity Wear Team
A range that runs S to XL is a range that has decided who its customer is, whether or not the brand meant it that way. Extending is the right call for most brands. It is also more than adding rows to a size chart, and pretending otherwise is how brands end up with a 3XL that fits like a tent and a stack of them nobody bought.
Grading does not stay linear
Between S and XL, sizes tend to grow by consistent increments and the garment keeps its proportions. Push beyond that and simply continuing the same increments produces something wrong — a garment that grew in every direction equally, when actual bodies at the larger end differ in some measurements much more than others.
A well-made 3XL usually gains more in chest and body width than in body length, and often needs the armhole and sleeve reconsidered rather than scaled. This is why extended sizes on a good blank fit and extended sizes on a badly graded one do not, and it is a specification question to raise with your supplier rather than assume.
It costs more, and saying so is fine
Larger garments use more fabric. That is a real cost, and many blank ranges carry an upcharge above XL for exactly that reason. Brands handle it three ways: absorb it and price flat across the range, pass it on with a size-based price, or price flat and accept a thinner margin on the large end.
Flat pricing is the friendliest and is what most direct brands choose, because a visible surcharge on larger sizes reads badly regardless of how defensible the arithmetic is. Just make sure you have done the arithmetic before choosing it.
The forecasting problem, honestly
The reason brands hesitate is inventory risk: extending from four sizes to seven means more SKUs per design, and each one is a separate forecast on which you have no data. If your first order is 20 pieces across seven sizes, you have roughly three of each, which is not depth in anything.
Two practical ways round it:
- 1Extend on your proven designs first. A design with sell-through history is a much safer place to add sizes than a brand-new one, because you already know the design works and are only testing the size.
- 2Extend one step at a time. Adding XXL before 3XL, and 3XL before 4XL, lets each step earn the next. A brand that jumps to a full XS–5XL range on a first order is forecasting ten sizes with zero evidence.
Publish measurements for every size
This matters more at the ends of the range than in the middle. Customers who have been let down by inconsistent extended sizing across brands do not trust letters, and rightly so. Flat chest, body length, sleeve and shoulder for every single size you offer removes the guesswork and materially reduces returns.
And photograph the garment on more than one body if you can. A size chart tells someone the numbers; a photograph tells them what it looks like, which is the actual question.
The ordering mechanics
Mixed sizes are included inside our 20-piece minimum per design, so widening a range does not require widening the order. That is the mechanism that makes stepwise extension practical — you can add a size to a design, order a realistic curve, and see whether it moves, without committing to a separate run for it.
