Fit
₦461 Million: What Sizing Silence Is Costing West African Fashion
28 Jun 2026
Most West African fashion brands are not at the "which fit technology should I buy" stage. They are at a stage that precedes technology entirely: the "our size chart is in inches only and our return window closes before some customers' orders arrive" stage. The problem is the absence of measurement, not the absence of innovation.
As far as I could find, no West African fashion brand had been scored on sizing intelligence, or asked these questions: Does this brand's size chart contain actual body measurements? Does the product page tell the customer how the item fits? If the size is wrong, what can the customer do about it? And what does all of this cost, per brand, per year?
When I could not find answers, I built a framework to get them.
Over six weeks I audited eleven brands across Nigeria and Ghana. The list includes some of the most recognised names in West African fashion: brands featured in international press, shown at global fashion weeks, and stocked by serious international retailers.
Each brand was scored out of 100 across five dimensions:
- Size chart quality
- Fit communication
- Customer support for fit
- Return confidence
- Product page clarity
Every finding was verified directly on each brand's website, and every score was assigned on what a customer could find on the page.
The average score across eleven brands was 41 out of 100, and none scored above 70. Three brands scored F. Six scored D. One luxury label, selling pieces priced above ₦1.2 million, scored particularly low: its return policy stated "No returns. No exchanges. All sales are final," while its own size guide acknowledged that sizing and cut may vary between fits.
Think about what that means in practice. A customer spends ₦1.2 million on a made-to-order dress, waits weeks for it to be produced, tries it on, and it does not fit. The brand's return policy gives her nowhere to go.
The Sizing Tax accumulates through three moments most brands are not measuring.
The first is the abandoned cart. A customer finds something she wants, cannot confidently confirm her size, and leaves without buying. Brands rarely see this, because she leaves no trace.
The second is the sizing return. A customer buys anyway, guessing her size, receives the wrong one and tries to return it, only to discover that the return window is seven days from delivery, her order took ten days to arrive, and the return cost is on her. So she keeps the wrong item and never buys again.
The third is the lost customer. A customer has one poor sizing experience and stops buying. Every item she would have bought in every subsequent season is already lost, and no signal reaches the brand that anything went wrong.
These three moments, applied conservatively across the eleven brands using published global benchmarks adapted for the African market's lower return rates and different customer behaviour, add up to a combined annual Sizing Tax of ₦461 million.
I also audited ASOS using the same framework. ASOS scored 93 out of 100.
The gap between the West African average and ASOS is 49 points. The widest single gap, 12.5 points, is in return confidence. The second widest, 10.6 points, is in size chart quality.
These are not gaps that require technology to close. Part of ASOS's advantage on size chart quality comes from something as plain as an accessible size guide with measurements published in both centimetres and inches.
The Sizing Tax is a fashion story, but the dynamic underneath it is not unique to fashion. It is an industry measuring the wrong things and losing money to a problem that has never been defined.
West African businesses are making decisions on incomplete measurement. They invest in visible problems because visible problems feel urgent, and ignore invisible ones because invisible problems do not appear in any report.
This report makes one invisible problem visible. It names it, quantifies it, and assigns it to specific organisations in specific amounts.
If sizing is killing more fashion sales than bad marketing, and it is, why has nobody been counting the cost?
Now somebody has.
The Sizing Tax: West Africa Fashion Report 2026 is available as a free download. It includes individual scores and findings for all eleven audited brands, the full financial model, the comparison against ASOS, and five zero-cost recommendations brands can implement immediately.