Re: [96attendees] T-Shirts

[Choosing this message to respond to.]

I was responsible for the t-shirt orders for this IETF with assistance from a producer in the UK.

As part of the materials the host is supplied for to do planning, we received a spreadsheet consisting of t-shirt size requests from IETF 83.  Using this, I attempted to do a projection based on those numbers for how many of a given size to order, usually favoring to stay within 1-2 standard deviations of the mean for a given size.  The prior meetings seemed to roughly do their orders simply by picking approximately 1500 shirts and ordering sizes against a Normal distribution.

Per advice from Alia and Tom, the derived numbers received in increase in the number of women's t-shirts of most sizes and very slightly bumped up the number of very large shirts.

I will be sending a surveymonkey survey out in a few minutes to try to gather some data regarding how people responded to sizing and whether they picked up the shirt size that they ordered.  We will be bundling this along with actual sizes ordered to provide as data for future hosts.  

Ideally our process would involve an attendee getting a ticket for the size that they ordered, and we'd track the size they received.  This would help us to move to more actual numbers rather than some of the statistical planning it's been obvious prior hosts have had to do.

With regard to shirt sizing, my observation has been we tend to get "American sized" or "European sized" (really, most everywhere else) shirts.  The variations in regional sizing is partially what we see as being responsible for shirt fit issues.  As an example, I tend to wear XXL in European and XL in American and knowing the t-shirt brand in advance I'd change my size order.

The choice had been made when working with the producer was to find a more American sized shirt.  This seems to have backfired for a portion of our attendees.  Based on feedback and some of our discussions while going through the ordering process, posting the brand of t-shirt and a sizing chart during IETF registration probably makes sense.  The main challenge is that the ordering and production process often begins after IETF registration begins, and even then a host must make orders based on estimates in order to have shirts available at the conference.

I personally apologize for any difficulties that may have been had with finding a shirt of the appropriate size.  I had already promised the planning committee to try to provide our planning information to help additional hosts and will be trying to find a way to help set down some of the challenges of navigating sizing and counts.  Likely not in a Internet-Draft, though. :-)

-- Jeff

> On Jul 19, 2016, at 5:58 PM, Kathleen Moriarty <kathleen.moriarty.ietf@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is the second IETF I was not able to get a T-shirt.  This time I
> tried on Monday, last time it was a Tuesday.  The problem seems to be
> that men are taking the women sizes.  For this meeting, I was told
> that many men thought the men's sizes were too big, so they took a
> size they didn't order.
> 
> Can we either plan to order the size we will request or just order
> more smaller sizes than what people request, preferably the former.
> 
> I think we are consistently left with the bigger sizes, but could be wrong.
> 
> -- 
> 
> Best regards,
> Kathleen
> 
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