What we need off a garment you already own

Brand and size is genuinely enough

Two garments that fit you well, with the brand and the size on the label, and we can work out what you take in brands you've never worn. That's what the size charts are for. You don't need to measure yourself, and you don't need to find a style number.

If you can read Patagonia and M off a fleece, you're done. Go do that instead of reading the rest of this page.

Where the two tags are

Most garments have two, and they say different things.

The neck or waistband tag — the one you can see when you put it on. Brand and size, usually nothing else. This is the one you want.

The care tag — a longer strip sewn into a side seam, often near the hem, sometimes several layers deep. Fabric content, washing symbols, country of manufacture, and often a long code. That code is what this page is about.

On a lot of modern clothing the neck tag is printed straight onto the fabric and wears off first, while the care tag survives. If the size is gone, the care tag is where to look next.

The model name is the useful extra

Brands make the same garment for years under a name — a Patagonia Better Sweater, an Arc'teryx Atom, a Carhartt Detroit jacket, a North Face Nuptse. That name is what we track, and it's what tells us a listing is the same thing as your garment rather than merely the same brand.

It's often on the neck tag under the brand, and if it isn't, it's usually searchable — see below.

One case where the model changes the size answer rather than the item: Dickies 874 trousers are tagged about two inches larger than the body they fit. If you own a pair, say 874 and we'll apply that. Most brands don't grade their lines differently, so for everything else the model name helps us find the thing, not size it.

When the tag doesn't say what it is

Care tags carry codes the brand uses internally. They look like 25528, J130, 13MWZ or STY-4821. They are not standardised and they don't mean anything to us directly — but they're searchable.

Put the brand and the code into a search engine together:

patagonia 25528

and the first result is usually the product page, which gives you the model name in plain English. Then tell us that.

If the brand name itself is gone

Look for RN followed by a number — an RN is a US registration number identifying the company that made or imported the garment. Search RN 51884 and you'll get the company. It won't tell you the model, but it will tell you whose garment you're holding.

If the tag is cut out or unreadable

Then skip it. A garment you can't identify isn't worth twenty minutes — tell us a different one, or use the rough-size option on the form and name your usual size. That's a weaker signal and we'll mark what it produces as an estimate, but it works and it takes ten seconds.

You can also come back later. Adding a garment doesn't overwrite anything; we merge it with what you've already told us, so you can do this one garment at a time whenever you happen to be near your closet.

What we do with it

Your garments become an estimate of your body, and that estimate becomes a predicted size in every brand we hold a chart for. You can see and correct that estimate on the form itself.

It's worth knowing the limits. We're reading a size chart that describes the garment when it was new, and your garment has been washed and worn since — and the secondhand piece we'd match you to has been worn too. It's our best read from both ends and it can miss. That's why the form lets you overrule any number we work out, and why we say so rather than presenting a guess as a measurement.