Is Brandy Melville closing its fitting rooms for good? The teen favorite courted controversy once again last week, when customers across the US, the UK, and Canada took to social media to share photos and videos of seemingly shuttered in-store fitting rooms. Users purporting to be staff confirmed this, with videos of them disassembling the fitting rooms and confirming the closures.

Online, the alleged closures have been attributed to everything from “the gum issue” (customers reportedly using chewing gum to stick the curtain to the wall for privacy) to vandalism, and renovation. The backlash has been swift, and fierce. “Why does Brandy hate [its] customers?” one TikTok user asked. “Very interesting policy update from a company with notoriously difficult sizing,” commented another, referencing the brand’s one-size-fits-all policy, which generally translates to an XS-S size range, despite general consumer demand for more inclusive sizing. Brandy Melville also does not accept returns, taking goods back for exchange only, a factor that has added fuel to the furor. The company has not confirmed the closures, and did not respond to requests for comment from Vogue Business.

Brandy Melville, which was founded in Italy but trades on a laidback California-inspired aesthetic, would join a growing list of stores closing fitting rooms, including UK supermarkets Sainsbury’s and Tesco (which sell clothes under brands Tu and F&F, respectively) and US thrift chain Goodwill.

Each Goodwill region operates independently, so communications on the matter have varied from local Facebook posts and in-store signage to online statements. In a fitting room FAQs section on its website, Goodwill’s Valleys region (which serves central, southwest, and south Virginia) said: “Keeping fitting rooms open, and maintained, requires additional staffing and expenses that we are not equipped to manage. Diverting our staffing resources away from fitting room maintenance allows us to focus on a quality shopping experience and allows our retail teams to focus on tasks such as stocking the sales floor with premium items.” Certain Goodwill locations have highlighted theft as a further driver for fitting room closures. It’s a reason highlighted by many charity retailers, often staffed by a patchwork of volunteers ill-equipped to deal with it.

Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s wrote on X in February 2025 that its closures were designed to “simplify and reduce tasks in stores”.

The closures come during a difficult period for in-store retail. In 2025 alone, the failure of 57 major businesses impacted 3,384 stores and 32,553 employees in the UK, per the Center of Retail Research. US retailers, meanwhile, shuttered over 8,200 stores in 2025, a 12% year-on-year increase from 2024 and one of the highest numbers ever recorded, according to retail research firm Coresight Research. When times are tough, brands are quick to identify ways to cut the fat, and space comes at a premium. But while there could be short-term financial gains to be made from closing fitting rooms such as cutting operational costs and maximizing floor space, experts say the move could be detrimental to sustainability and long-term profitability.

What about the customer experience?

Many Brandy Melville shoppers are already signaling their intentions to boycott the brand’s own stores. “If I can’t try it on, I’m not buying it,” said one commenter, while others have been encouraging fellow shoppers to go to US retailer Pacsun, which stocks Brandy Melville, if they want to try on, swapping direct retail for wholesale, which could cut margins by up to half.

“[Fitting rooms are] a big part of a brand’s balance sheet. You’re renting based on square footage and that square footage incorporates fitting rooms, back of house, staff kitchens, everything,” says Rebecca Morter, founder and CEO of Lone Design Club, which helps digital-first brands launch short-term physical retail spaces. “All of this cuts into your trading space on the shop floor, and that space becomes really precious because it’s essentially how you’re going to make all of your revenue.”

Fitting rooms are a defining element of the customer experience, often reflecting brand segmentation. A budget shopper might accept harried staff or an inadequate privacy curtain in exchange for a bargain, whereas a luxury shopper may expect a courteous style advisor, items delivered to their fitting room, champagne on arrival, and plenty of space to consider their purchases. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that the closures have been limited to relatively affordable brands.

“[The fitting room experience] is seen as central to the DNA of a brand,” says Morter. But as brands increasingly focus on cementing their online presence, Morter believes some have forgotten the importance of the physical retail experience. “I think we’ve lost the sense that the fitting room is a special and intimate place where the sales associate is able to convey knowledge and support that consumer’s experience. If you can get a customer into the fitting room, the chance of conversion is so much higher, and it increases with the number of items they’re trying on. It’s a key sign for the staff to bring customers through the experience to purchase.”

Fitting rooms have become a big part of a brands’ organic social media reach, too, with influencers and everyday consumers taking to fitting rooms to post try-on content. Stores such as Reformation and River Island in the UK are praised for comfortable, airy fitting rooms with attentive staff, while others are derided for long queues and poor lighting. Canadian womenswear brand Aritzia often comes under fire for its fitting rooms, which feature mirrorless cubicles, forcing customers to use the communal space to assess their outfits (an Artitzia spokesperson says they are “intentionally designed to enhance the shopping experience and to foster a sense of community”, and that the brand has private, mirrored fitting suites available on request). Many who shopped during the ’90s and early aughts will remember anxiety-inducing set-ups, which featured no cubicles at all, and required you to strip in front of total strangers.

Premium Danish menswear brand Son of a Tailor saw the value in investing in the physical sales funnel while fitting out its Copenhagen concept store. “The traditional fitting room tends to be a friction point. It’s often an afterthought of fluorescent lights and guesswork that results in an unsatisfying customer experience,” says CEO and co-founder Jess Fleischer. “By designing the store around a personal one-to-one fitting experience with the option to book dedicated appointments, we put fit where it belongs: at the center. The fitting room is about double the size of traditional ones […] so the customer has space and privacy, while our store team is at hand to guide them through.”

Some stores appear to be taking note of the demand for more customer-focused operations. In April, Tesco announced it was trialing the reopening of F&F fitting rooms in select stores, and the company will be heeding consumer feedback on the matter, considering how it can make improvements to the customer experience in the future. However, Catharina Martinez-Pardo, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group in Düsseldorf, can see why closures in multi-category retailers such as Tesco could make sense. “There are some stores where clothing is a very small percentage of the store, so reducing some of those [fitting room] areas does make a lot of sense from an individual perspective,” she says.

When clothes are the major product category, however, Martinez-Pardo has doubts. “I’m not sure if the business case has been properly, holistically done,” she says. Though fitting room closures may represent quick savings, they could well be outweighed by the operational effort and cost of online returns, as customers must take their best guess on sizing, or buy multiples of one item. “I struggle to see how that’s not significantly more costly than operating fitting rooms and more customer service areas in stores.”

Finding the right fit

Some retailers acknowledge that returns will increase as fitting rooms disappear. Both Brandy Melville and Goodwill extended returns windows in tandem with closing their fitting rooms, the former for exchange or store credit only — causing further criticism as it leaves shoppers locked into the brand. But returns are growing a thorn in retailers’ sides. According to research by the National Retail Federation, 15.8% of total annual sales were set to be returned in 2025 at a value of $849.9 billion. This makes it much harder for brands to get a clear view of their balance sheets and drives up waste, as returns aren’t guaranteed to make it back onto the shop floor.

In 2023, the British Fashion Council’s Institute of Positive Fashion (IPF) convened a host of industry experts to provide guidance for brands on how to curb return rates. Given that fit is often cited as the leading reason for returns, guidance includes making it easier for customers to find the right fit. Closing fitting rooms is contradictory to this goal — and the data backs it up. Across the industry, around 10% of items bought in-store are returned, compared to 30% online, the IPF found. But some brands exceed this. In its 2026 Return Economics report, Swedish e-commerce logistics supplier Ingrid noted that one mid-market womenswear brand it works with in the UK saw return rates top 52%, up 4 percentage points year-on-year. And according to Pelin Anli Bedirhanoglu, director of product management at Zalando, size-related returns for jeans can reach up to 65%.

“We see significantly lower return rates in-store compared to online. That’s driven by the expertise of our teams, but also by the simple fact that customers can try on products and leave with something they feel confident in,” says Gareth Cullen, general manager for the UK, Ireland, and France at circular denim brand Nudie Jeans.

“When consumers can’t assess fit before buying, brands essentially shift that moment from before to after the purchase. Retailers often end up paying for the outcome of the fit assessment in the form of increased returns and the associated operational inconveniences. Reverse logistics and restocking costs, along with margin erosion, quickly add up for fashion brands,” adds Kara Holthaus, chief customer officer at US retail loss solution company Appriss Retail. “In an industry where trends are short and inventory timing is tight, a spike in return volume hits the bottom line harder than most brands publicly acknowledge. Retailers often associate these losses as a cost of doing business, but returns-related losses have a one-to-one impact on profits. Across the retail industry, we’ve found that over $100 billion worth of annual returns are preventable.” The losses aren’t just operational costs. Per the IPF, 50% of returns get discounted at an average 40% reduction.

The knock-on effect for sustainability

Then, there are the environmental costs to consider. In its report, the IPF stated that about 750,000 tons of CO2 was emitted by returns handling in the UK in 2022, including transport, warehousing, repackaging, and disposal. Transportation was the biggest contributor, accounting for almost 50% of total CO2 emissions.

Annabel Thomas, chief revenue officer at circular fashion logistics hub ACS Clothing, explains what the reverse logistics process looks like. “Once [returned items] are received at our facility, they need to be [unpackaged], assessed, and graded in terms of condition and odor, and whether they need to be sanitized, cleaned, or repaired,” she says. “All of that is done by a human, which is time and labor-intensive. After it follows the chosen route, which is determined according to different brand guidelines, a garment will receive a final quality check. If it has met those standards, it will be sent back to the brand, and they can distribute it online or in-store. If it fails, then it will go to the next best use or additional exit channels.”

For ACS, which handles both online and in-store returns, additional channels include outlet sales and donation. The company is “anti-landfill and incineration”, according to Thomas. However, many items that enter a brand’s returns system will end up in landfill. The European Environment Agency estimates that an average of 22-43% of all returned clothing bought online ends up destroyed.

Stores like Brandy Melville, Goodwill, Tesco, and Sainsbury’s might not deem the sustainability impact to be worth the financial cost of reverse logistics. That’s why reverse logistics companies like ACS say they serve brands from the mid-tier and up. “If they’re selling at a depressed price, it doesn’t make sense to add more cost when then they’ll make a loss on the item,” says Thomas.

For lower price retailers such as Brandy Melville, which sells tank tops from $8, there may be an increased risk of product waste if the cost of reverse logistics amounts to a loss. The brand states that all returns must be unworn and unwashed, with any original tags attached, but there is no public information available as to the rate of returned items that are re-entered into stock. However, the brand has already come under fire for causing waste when an HBO documentary, Brandy Hellville and the Cult of Fast Fashion, linked it with the fast fashion business model of overproduction and waste colonialism, in which cheap Western clothes are cast off to the Global South. (The company provided no statement for the documentary and has not made comments on it since.)

Short of reopening fitting rooms, Brandy Melville and others like it would need to tackle sizing from the ground up to prevent increased returns. It’s a hill many brands have been trying to climb, with those from Burberry to Asos introducing virtual try-on. German retailer Zalando has developed a suite of more than 25 size and fit solutions, ranging from personalized size advice and virtual fitting room experiences to tools that support its brand partners and internal teams, says Anli Bedirhanoglu. “Fit is one of the clearest areas where technology can deliver a measurable sustainability impact. In 2025, [our solutions] prevented 8% of size-related returns overall. This means fewer unnecessary shipments, greater confidence for customers, and a more sustainable business.”

Per research by McKinsey, fashion and apparel consumers still value an in-store experience. Only 18% say they shop mostly online. The rest prefer a mix of online and in-store, or shop predominantly in-store, and the backlash to the recent spate of fitting room closures shows that being able to try clothes on constitutes a big part of the appeal. Without tackling fit in other ways, stores risk losing customers and compounding the growing financial and environmental impact of returns.

“When you address the fit problem at the source, you radically elevate the customer experience and solve the fashion industry’s return crisis simultaneously,” says Son of a Tailor’s Fleischer.