Comment by altairprime

Yes, this will likely exacerbate that further in the short-term: if retailers simply stop producing outlier sizes to reduce disposal of those sizes, then various niches will open up. In US women’s flats, very few go up to size 12+ (it’s already higher-cost to make products in outlier sizes and most don’t!) and so the one retailer (agaik) that offers that size has 100% market share, and keeps an inventory warehouse of unsold product that is listed until it sells at up to 80% discounts after a year-plus on the shelf. Another handful of retailers specialize exclusively in women’s clothing for people XL and above, which allows them to profit equally as well from less-common sizes.

My hope, however, is that this reduces overseas manufacturing in favor of domestic, which would allow retailers to dramatically reduce the shipping costs for small production batches, so that they’re able to simply produce more small batches of less-common sizes in response to demand. Sure, they might see a few percent lower profits per item, but they’ll be able to sell considerably more of their product simply by raising their supply to meet demand with finer granularity than the cheaper ‘produce an entire season one-time only and store it in a cargo container’ model offers today.