Why most of our clothes have no barcode

Most of the clothes on this site have no barcode. Not a hidden one, not one we decided against printing – there is no number to print. That sounds like something a shop would rather not say out loud, so here is the whole explanation.

Where a barcode comes from

A Global Trade Item Number is bought, not earned. A company registers with GS1, buys a numbering prefix, and assigns numbers from it to the products it sells at retail. The number identifies that exact style in that exact colourway everywhere in the world, which is what makes it useful: paste one into a search engine and every other retailer selling the same thing comes back.

That system works because somebody in the chain is a retail brand. It stops working the moment nobody is.

Why ours do not have one

We stock two kinds of garment, and neither reaches a barcode.

• Made-to-order blanks. These are produced when you order them, from a mill’s own blank – a Gildan crewneck, a Stanley/Stella tee, an AS Colour hood. The mill numbers its blanks with a part number, not a retail barcode, because the blank was never meant to sit on a shelf under its own name.
• Factory-direct goods. These come from the mills that cut them, without a label sewn in. An unbranded garment has no brand owner, so there is no prefix for a number to come from.

What is on the product page instead

The Specifications tab on every listing carries four things you can actually use:

• The brand. For a made-to-order blank that is the mill – and the mill publishes its own size chart and fabric specification, which you can check against ours.
• A part number. The mill’s own code where one exists, and our stock code where it does not. Ours is not a barcode and does not pretend to be.
• A line saying there is no GTIN, and which of the two reasons above applies. An empty row would be worse than the truth.
• Fabric and weight, straight from the supplier’s own specification rather than rewritten into something friendlier.

What you lose, and what you get

You lose the ability to price-compare in one paste. That is a real loss and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What you get in exchange is a plain garment with nobody’s logo on it, at a price that is not carrying a brand’s marketing budget. The reason a barcode is missing is the same reason the shirt costs what it does.

How to check us anyway

Where the brand is a mill, look it up. Stanley/Stella, Gildan, AS Colour, Comfort Colors and Cotton Heritage all publish full size charts and fabric weights on their own sites, and our Specifications tab names the exact model. If our number and theirs disagree, theirs is right and we want to hear about it.

For factory-direct goods, the honest answer is that you are trusting us and our returns policy. Thirty days from the day the parcel arrives, no restocking fee, and we say who pays the postage on the Return & Refund Policy page. That is the guarantee doing the work a barcode used to.