At an average of 91.88cm (just over 36”), the biggest male waistlines in the UK belong to folk from the West Midlands, according to new data from virtual fitting room company Fits.me. Following close behind are Wales (with an average waistline of 91.53cm), the east of England (91.52cm), NW England (91.47cm) and the north of Scotland (91.37cm).
After Birmingham – whose men average 92.06cm around their middle – the UK cities with the largest average male waistline measurements are Belfast (91.68cm), Sheffield (91.52cm), Liverpool (91.35cm) and Stoke-on-Trent (91.23cm).
The average British male waistline is 91.16cm, while the trimmest men in the UK can be found in Brighton, over an inch less than Birmingham at 89.12cm.
The figures come from analysis of the measurements of men who have submitted their own measurements to one of Fits.me’s virtual fitting rooms. Fits.me’s virtual fitting rooms are used by brands and retailers including Adidas, Hawes & Curtis, Pretty Green and Thomas Pink, to help their customers buy the right size of garment when shopping online.
Heikki Haldre, founder and chief executive of Fits.me, commented: “Retailers are competent at looking at their data to determine what they actually sold. It’s much more difficult for them to know what they could have sold, if only they had been able to put the right garments, in the right sizes, into the right countries or even regions.
“If you’re a retailer that knows there’s more than a full inch of difference between the average waistlines of the men of Brighton and Birmingham, then you might alter how many items of each size you send to your shops in those areas, both to maximise sales and to minimise the possibility of disappointing your customers by running out of the right sizes.
“Since we measure far more than simple waistlines and more than simple averages, the data we’re collecting could also help retailers to manufacture clothes that relate more closely to the sizes of real people than ever before. These are examples of ecommerce data being able to inform decision-making in the physical world,” concluded Haldre.
Internationally, Greece leads the way for the chunkiest fellas (97.53cm), followed by Turkey (97.45cm) and Saudi Arabia (97.03cm). British men measure in at a respectable 58th out of 81 countries in which data was collected, with the global average waist measurement being 92.55cm. Japan has the slimmest men, at an average 84.43cm.
The largest female waist measurements are in Nigeria (82.67cm), followed by Ghana (82.17cm) and Qatar (81.94cm), with Serbia the thinnest (71.66cm). At 80.45cm the UK’s ladies rank 11th (out of 85), with the global average for women standing at 76.46cm.
Fits.me’s virtual fitting room solutions help boost the profitability of online clothing retailers by enabling them to overcome what Mintel (Online Fashion, March 2012) describes as “the biggest obstacle facing them”: the fact that it is impossible for online shoppers physically to try on garments before buying.
Fits.me uses a sophisticated robotic mannequin that can mimic the shape and size of any body type. For any given brand or retailer, FitBots are photographed at high speed in thousands of permutations of body shape, while dressed in that brand/retailer’s key garments, in each available size. Then, on the brand/retailer’s site, Fits.me is able to display for online shoppers the key garment pictures that correspond to their exact body size and shape after asking for just a few basic measurements.
