Affiliate Disclosure

Where things stand today

There are no monetised links on this site at present. Product references in the editorial name garment categories and measurement bands rather than specific purchasable items, and none of them carry an outbound link.

No brand has paid to appear in the directory, and none could.

The machinery for handling affiliate links has been built ahead of having any, which is the safer order. It refuses to render a commercial link unless the merchant has approved this publication, the current programme terms have been read and are recent, and the link has been individually approved for activation. A link that fails any of those checks becomes ordinary text rather than quietly falling back to some other address.

How a paid link will be identifiable

When compensated links exist, they will be marked in three ways at once, because any one of them can be missed.

• A short disclosure appears above the recommendation, not in the footer and not on this page alone. A disclosure you reach after the recommendation is not a disclosure.
• The link itself carries rel="sponsored", which is the machine-readable statement that it is compensated.
• The destination is named in the link text, so you can tell where you are going before you go there.

Sources are not shopping links

Every figure in the brand directory cites the page it was read from, with the date it was read. Those citations are evidence, and they are handled by different code from commercial links: tracking parameters are stripped out of them at render time, they carry no commission, and this publication earns nothing when you follow one.

A citation will never be quietly upgraded into an affiliate link. If a merchant relationship ever exists for a brand, the paid link will be a separate, labelled thing, and the source will still be there beside it doing its own job.

What a commercial relationship does not buy

Being approved by a merchant is not coverage, and coverage is not a merchant relationship. The two are decided separately and in that order: research first, and a commercial arrangement only where one happens to exist afterwards.

• A correction is accepted or refused on the evidence. Who pays is not part of that judgement.
• Directory rankings and tool results are computed from published measurements. No commercial field is an input to any of them.
• A merchant cannot buy inclusion, a better position, or the removal of an unflattering figure.
• Where the best answer is to buy nothing, that is the answer given.

Methods this publication does not use

Some affiliate practices are legal, common, and still not compatible with a publication that asks readers to trust its measurements. None of the following is used, and the architecture has no place to put them.

• No automatic link rewriting, and no service that converts ordinary links into paid ones behind the scenes.
• No paid search advertising on merchant brand names, and no bidding on their trademarks.
• No coupon, cashback, loyalty, or comparison-engine model.
• No retargeting, no browser extension, no toolbar, and no sub-affiliate arrangement.
• No third-party affiliate script, pixel, or click tracker.

Affiliate commission

We expect to join retail affiliate programmes in future. When we do, some outbound links will earn a commission if you buy something after following them, at no additional cost to you.

Where a page contains such links, a disclosure appears above the content rather than beneath it. A disclosure you reach after the recommendation is not a disclosure.

• Commission never determines whether a garment is recommended.
• Commission never determines the order in which options are listed.
• A higher-paying alternative is not substituted for a better-fitting one.
• Where the best answer to a question is “buy nothing”, that is the answer given.

Commission terms are not uniform

It would be tidier to state one commission rate and one referral window for the whole site, and it would be untrue. Every merchant sets its own rate, its own referral window, and its own rules about what may be shown, and any of those can change without notice.

So no figure is quoted here. What is promised instead is procedural: the current terms are read before joining a programme and read again before a link goes live, and a reading that has gone stale stops the link rather than being rounded up to still true.

Sponsored content and gifted items

Should we ever publish sponsored editorial, it will be labelled as sponsored in the headline area, not in a footnote, and not with a euphemism such as “in partnership”.

If a brand supplies a garment at no cost, that will be stated in the article. A gifted garment does not earn a recommendation, and we will not describe a gifted item as having been tested unless it genuinely has been.

Inclusion in the directory

Brand directory entries are compiled from published size charts and garment measurements. Inclusion cannot be bought, and removal cannot be bought either.

Where a brand publishes no measurement for a field, the entry records that the figure is not published rather than estimating it.

Questions about this policy

If something on the site looks like an undisclosed commercial relationship, we would rather hear about it than not. Contact details are on the contact page.

Brands, retailers and affiliate managers are welcome to write as well, using the partnership route on the contact page. Sending a proposal does not change any of the rules above: coverage cannot be bought, a conclusion cannot be bought, and no link will go undisclosed.

One thing this page does not claim: that the arrangement described here satisfies every advertising and consumer-protection rule in every country a reader might be in. It describes what is actually done, which is the part that can be checked.