The 10% Problem: How Major Retailers Are Failing The Women Who Make Up Half Their Market

Through our own research, we’ve found that 20 of the major fashion retailers globally dedicate, on average, less than 10% of their total clothing offering to petite sizing. In some cases, significantly less: one retailer offering 176,323 pieces, and just 0.27% of them being ‘petite’. 

We also found that the US was also significantly worse with it’s petite offering compared to the UK (seeing numbers hit just over 1% of US collections being designed for petite women, compared to avg 8% in the UK).

And yet over 50% of women in the UK and US are 5’4” or under. That is not a niche. That is the majority of the female population, served by a fraction of the market.

I have spent over half a decade in the petite fashion industry. I founded DEWEY because I realised the majority of women were struggling to find clothing that didn’t drown; and, the fact that I lived this gap personally, at 5’2”, and I was tired of it. And still, every time I look at those numbers side by side, I find them quietly unbelievable.

The fashion industry did not arrive at this disparity by accident. It arrived here through decades of assumptions, structural exclusion, and a commercial logic that treated petite women as a secondary market rather than a primary one.

Standard sizing in fashion was largely developed in the mid-twentieth century using data from a narrow and unrepresentative sample of women. The result was a system built around an average that excluded a significant proportion of the population from the outset. Petite women were not forgotten. They were simply never the starting point.

By the time major retailers began introducing petite edits in the 1980s and 1990s, the architecture was already set. Petite became a subcategory. A reduced version of the main collection. An afterthought with its own rail, tucked somewhere near the back.

That positioning has barely shifted since.

When I talk about the 10% problem, I am not speaking abstractly. Walk into any major UK high street retailer and count the petite options against the mainline collection. Visit the websites of the ten biggest fashion retailers in the UK and filter by petite. What you will find, consistently, is a fraction of the styles available to standard sizing customers. Fewer silhouettes, fewer colours, fewer occasionwear options, fewer basics.

Research into size inclusivity in fashion retail consistently confirms this pattern. A 2020 analysis of major UK and US retailers found that petite sizing represented a small minority of total stock across all categories, with the gap widest in occasionwear, workwear, and outerwear [Mintel, Womenswear UK, 2020]. The categories where fit matters most are precisely the categories where petite women have the fewest options.

This is not a coincidence. It reflects a commercial decision, made repeatedly and across the industry, that petite women’s purchasing power is not worth the investment of a full collection.

I have heard the counterarguments. Petite sizing is expensive to develop separately. The market is smaller than it appears. Petite women can size down or alter standard pieces. None of these hold up.

The cost argument collapses when you consider that the same retailers invest heavily in extending their curve offerings, rightly so, because they recognise the commercial and ethical case for serving a wider range of bodies. The logic applied to curve sizing is not applied to petite sizing with anything close to the same conviction.

The market size argument is demonstrably false. Over 50% of women in the UK and US are 5’4” or under [ONS, 2010; CDC, 2021]. If anything, petite women represent an underserved majority, not a niche minority.

And the “size down or alter” argument is exactly the kind of deflection I wrote about in the petite tax piece. It places the burden of the industry’s failure on the women it is failing. Petite women should not have to engineer a workaround every time they want to get dressed.

The 10% problem is not just about quantity. It is about quality and range.

When petite sizing does exist, it is often limited to the most commercially safe options. Core basics. Simple silhouettes. The pieces least likely to require significant pattern adaptation. The result is that petite women who want to engage with trends, with occasionwear, with anything beyond a straight-leg trouser and a fitted top, are routinely left out.

Fashion is not purely functional. It is expressive, cultural, and deeply personal. When petite women are excluded from the full breadth of what a collection offers, they are not just being denied practical options. They are being denied participation in fashion itself. That is a form of exclusion that the industry has not yet taken seriously enough.

The solution is not a slightly larger petite edit bolted onto an existing collection. It is a fundamental rethinking of who fashion is designed for at the pattern-making stage.

At DEWEY, petite proportions are not an adaptation. They are the starting point. A 27-inch inseam as standard. Rises, sleeve lengths, and bodice proportions designed specifically for women 5’3” and under. That is what it looks like when petite women are genuinely centred in the design process, not accommodated as an afterthought.

The fashion industry has made significant progress on other dimensions of inclusivity in recent years. Body diversity, sustainable production, size range extension. These are meaningful shifts. But the 10% problem persists, largely unexamined, because petite women have not yet been loud enough about it.