A made-to-order garment is cut from the numbers you give us. If the numbers are wrong, the garment is wrong, and no amount of care downstream repairs that.
The good news is that measuring well is not difficult. It is mostly a matter of avoiding four specific mistakes.
Get someone else to do it
Measuring yourself introduces errors in a consistent direction: you rotate to see the tape, which shortens back measurements and widens front ones, and you cannot keep your arms down for the measurements that require your arms down.
Ten minutes of someone else’s time is the highest-value thing in this article.
Measure over the right layer
Take measurements over close-fitting clothing, or over nothing. Not over the jumper you happen to be wearing.
Then tell us what you measured over. A chest measurement taken over a shirt and one taken over bare skin can differ by an inch and a half, and we have no way to tell which you did unless you say.
Do not add ease
This is the mistake that causes the most rework.
Ease is the difference between your body and the garment — the room that lets you move, breathe and raise an arm. It belongs to the pattern, and it varies by garment type, by fabric and by cut. A structured jacket and a linen shirt need very different amounts of it over the same chest.
Give us your body measurements. If you add two inches “to be safe”, we add the pattern’s ease on top of your two inches, and the result is a garment that is four inches too big in a way that reads as sloppy rather than relaxed.
The tape should sit snug against the body — not tight enough to compress, not loose enough to sag. If you can slide a finger under it flat, that is about right.
Keep the tape level
The most common measuring error is a tape that has drifted downward at the back.
For anything that goes around you — chest, waist, hips — the tape should be parallel to the floor the whole way round. Check the back in a mirror, or have your helper check it. A tape that dips two inches at the back gives you a chest measurement that is simply wrong, and it is wrong in a way that looks plausible on paper.
Measure twice, and tell us when they disagree
Take each measurement twice. If the two readings differ by more than about a centimetre, take a third.
If they keep disagreeing, tell us the range rather than picking one. “Waist 82–85 depending on where I put the tape” is genuinely more useful to us than a confident 83, because it tells us the waist is soft and where the ambiguity lives. Pretending to a precision you do not have is worse than reporting the uncertainty.
Tell us how you want it to sit
Measurements describe your body. They do not describe what you want.
The things we cannot infer from numbers:
- Where you wear your trousers. On the waist, on the hip, somewhere between. This changes the pattern substantially.
- Sleeve length preference. With or without a shirt cuff showing.
- How you want it to feel. Close, easy, deliberately loose. “Fitted” means different things to different people and it is worth a sentence rather than a word.
- Asymmetries. One shoulder lower than the other is extremely common and completely workable — if we know. If we do not, we cut symmetrically and you get a garment that hangs slightly off.
None of this is unusual to be asked, and none of it is unusual to have. Bodies are asymmetric. Patterns can be too.
Send a reference garment’s measurements
If you own something that fits the way you want, measure it — flat, on a table — and send those numbers alongside your body measurements.
This is the single most useful thing you can give us. It converts a subjective preference into a set of numbers, and it removes the guesswork about ease entirely, because you have handed us a garment whose ease you have already approved by wearing it.
If it still is not right
Say specifically what is wrong. “The shoulders are fine but the sleeves are long” is a fifteen-minute alteration. “It doesn’t fit” starts a diagnostic conversation.
Made-to-order pieces are cut to your measurements and cannot be resold, so our first move is always alteration rather than return — see how the returns window works for how that fits alongside the standard 30 days.