Every shop tells you its sale is remarkable. A coat at “40% off” against a price nobody has paid in two years; a bag “reduced” to exactly what it cost last month. There is no way, standing in front of it, to tell a real reduction from a sticker.
The information that would settle it is simple and nobody publishes it: what has this actually been selling for?
So we started writing it down
Once a day, every piece we carry, at every stockist that sells it. Not the recommended price, not the crossed-out price — the price you would actually pay that morning, including delivery and any duty.
It is unglamorous and there is no shortcut. Price history accumulates in calendar time and nothing else: start today and in a year you have a year, and no amount of money buys the eleven months you skipped. That is the whole reason we began recording before the site was finished.
What it lets us say
Once there is a year behind a piece, the useful questions become answerable:
- Is this cheap, or merely cheaper than last week?
- Has it been this price before, and how often?
- Is this brand’s real discount window in July, or in the last week of November?
- If I wait, am I likely to save money — or just lose my size?
The last one matters more than people expect. The deepest discounts come when stock is thinnest, and a reduction on a size you do not wear is not a reduction at all.
The other number nobody shows you
A shirt listed at £215 by a shop outside the UK can cost over £300 by the time it reaches you. Duty, import VAT and the courier’s clearance fee are all real, all charged after you have paid, and none of them appear next to the price.
So when we say an offer is the cheapest, we mean the total. Sometimes the shop with the highest ticket price is the one to buy from, and the only way to know is to add it all up.
Where we are
Early. The method is built and the recording has started; the catalogue is still filling out as we are approved by each stockist. We would rather launch with a small number of pieces we can say something true about than a large number we cannot.
If you want to be told when a specific piece drops below what it has been selling for, that is what we are building. Everything else follows from the writing down.