One sure sign that brands recognize the importance of customer reviews is how aggressively Amazon and Google have sued companies that sell fake ones. Even more of a premium: Reviews with photos—which, with clothing in particular, can help shoppers visualize how something will look on them when they see a reviewer with a similar body type modeling it—and as a result reduce the likelihood they’ll return the items.
Eight in 10 Americans find photos in product reviews from other customers more helpful than the brand’s product photos, according to a survey from Power Reviews. One-third of Gen Z and about one-fifth of millennials won’t purchase a product online if it has no images or videos from other purchasers, according to the study.
But a new academic study finds that when it comes to clothing, plus-sized consumers, due to “social and cultural stigma,” are less likely than other consumers to leave any reviews, and even less likely to leave reviews with photos.
The study is by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy and the University of Washington.
“If you are a plus-size person who is out there in the world, you have probably experienced some form of discrimination,” Uttara Ananthakrishnan, assistant professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon who co-authored the paper, told Retail Brew.
Sometimes that discrimination is triggered when plus-size consumers post product reviews, she continued.
“If someone says, ‘This dress didn’t fit me at all—it was really cute, but it is not designed for a plus-size person,’ the immediate comment that they could receive is, ‘Well go to the gym, maybe it doesn’t fit you because you are too fat,’” Ananthakrishnan said.
Making it big: More than half (54.4%) of women in the US wear a size 14 or above, while the most common dress size in the country is a size 16, according to 2024 data from Mys Tyler, an online community that draws on size information from more than 42,000 US women.
To better understand those consumers’ attitudes about posting reviews, the new study analyzes two years of data from 2021 and 2022 from an unnamed (due to a non-disclosure agreement) US-based subscription women’s clothing rental company. Like websites where products are for sale rather than rent, users pick the items based on product pages with reviews, and have an option to return items for another rental if they don’t fit or they dislike them for other reasons.
Dividing users by size—with medium size 6 to 12, and plus above 12—it found plus-sized users were less likely to post reviews at all and even less likely to post reviews with photos. Plus-sized reviewers rented 48.2% of the items that medium-sized users did, meaning that if those plus-sized users were posting proportionately they’d also account for 48.2% of the reviews, but:
- Plus-sized users posted 42.8% of the reviews that medium-sized users did.
- For reviews with photos, plus-sized users posted only 24.8% of the photo reviews that medium-sized users did.
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The study also found that products with photo reviews from plus-sized users increase the demand for those products by 10% among other plus-sized users.
So it would behoove retailers to motivate more plus-sized customers to leave reviews with photos, but the question is how?
Living large: Platforms should provide anonymity to users, because not doing so “could lead to self-censoring, particularly among users who routinely experience social stigma,” the report stated.
Ananthakrishnan explained that in practice, that anonymity means enabling users to choose a public name that’s not their given name and to not reveal their faces, whether by blurring, cropping, or the time-honored emoji superimposed over the head.
Such anonymizing strategies are the “kinds of things are really helpful and might encourage that safe space,” Kara Richardson Whitely, author of Gorge: My Journey Up Kilimanjaro at 300 Pounds and the founder and CEO of The Gorgeous Agency, which helps brands reach the plus-sized market, told Retail Brew.
“What I think this study shows is that there are simple ways to help engage this consumer who has been historically left out of the mix,” Richardson Whitely continued. “When it comes to shopping, particularly apparel, there’s been so much trauma in the marketplace for the plus-size person.”