When it comes to clothes, shoes, etc, time of ownership can be deceptive. Having a coat for 10 years for example doesn’t mean it’s a robust coat. Wear and tear needs to play a more important role, however tracking that can prove complicated over long periods of time. Especially when you want to make direct comparisons with other similar items in your wardrobe.
Enter Cost per Wear, a relatively simple analytic which allows you to see a product as a function of the price you bought it for against the number of times it has been worn. Allowing you to look at product usage without taking time into consideration. Why is this important?
Say you buy two coats:
Both look relatively similar, so you’re like what a deal on the Grey Long Coat!
As you start to wear both of them, you without realising start drifting towards wearing one more than the other. This could be for a variety of reasons, e.g. how it sits on your frame, how it goes with the other items in your wardrobe, or even one of them starts to show signs of wear more significantly than the other. We make so many of these decisions without realising…
So now you’re a year into having both of these coats and unfortunately the Grey Long Coat develops a significant tear and needs to be disposed off. At this point you think to yourself … wow! I got a years use out of this coat, what an amazing deal, I need to get an identical one from the same brand… Hmm, wait right there for a moment. What if once you start digging into it further, a different picture appears?
What if after tallying up usage, you realised that you had worn the Grey Long Coat a total of 7 times, but the Herringbone Overcoat a total of 18 times over the last year? Even though you have had the coats for a similar amount of time, you are getting significantly more utility from one over the other.
Now that you are starting to paint a fuller picture of which product will get more use over time, and last longer, you are better positioned to make more informed future purchase decisions leading to less wastage, and you will be spending your budget on products that will not get discarded after a few uses… better for the bottom line and the environment… win-win.
In this specific example you can see from the analytics, in every dimension what you originally thought was the more expensive coat, actually turns out to be the cheaper coat in the long run. If you look at the Cost per Wear (and everything else), the £600 Coat is now £40 per wear, cheaper than the £280 Coat which is at £48.57!
I hope this short introduction helps you see the ways in which you can start making more informed decisions.
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