Cutting That Page Down to Three

One hundred and thirteen. That’s how many hoodies sit on one category page as of this week, which is far more than anybody scrolls through in a single sitting. Most people give it five or six swipes, notice the same cropped chest print coming back at them, and shut the tab. So before you open the hoodie section over at Essential Clothing, it pays to decide what you’re filtering on, because the page won’t do that part on your behalf.

Three finalists is the number to aim for. Not one. Three, and I’ll get to the reason further down.

Scrolling is not a filter

Thing is, a grid that long has no opinion of its own. Nothing’s ordered by weight or by how loud the graphic is, and whoever typed the titles in was clearly doing it on different days, so some read like a color swatch while others just say hoodie and leave you squinting at a photo. There are 246 products on the site in total, give or take whatever went live this morning, and hoodies make up close to half of that — which tells you plenty about what sells and nothing whatsoever about which one belongs in your closet.

The search bar doesn’t rescue you either. Type the obvious phrase and most of the catalogue comes back, hoodies tangled up with sweatpants and tees.

Start from the money, because it cuts hardest

Price is the one field on that page that’s consistent, so it’s the cleanest first cut. The hoodies run from $⁠50 at the very bottom to a lone $⁠190 listing at the top, and the spread in between is lumpier than you’d expect. This is roughly how the 113 break up.

Pick a band and you’ve deleted sixty or seventy listings in one move, without opening anything. If your ceiling is $⁠110, the whole upper third stops existing and you’re looking at a shortlist of 78 instead of 113. Still too many, but it’s progress, and it took about four seconds.

Twenty-three of them land on exactly $⁠99 and another twenty-three on exactly $⁠110. Those two clumps are where most of the page lives.

Half the titles name a color, half leave you guessing

I counted: 49 of the 113 put a color in the listing name. Black leads with nine, the gray ones add up to another nine once you count both of the spellings the titles use, brown has five, and mint and green sit at four apiece. After that it thins out into singles — seafoam, buttercream, ink, coral, a pink one. The other sixty-odd say nothing, which means you’re reading the photograph, and photographs lie about color constantly. A cream reads white on a bright screen. A dark olive looks black until it arrives in daylight.

So my second cut is blunt. Decide on two color families you’d genuinely reach for on a Tuesday morning, say, and then scroll straight past anything whose title won’t commit to one of them. You lose a few decent hoodies that way. You also stop burning twenty minutes zooming into thumbnails trying to work out if something is taupe or beige, and that trade is worth it.

• Two color families, picked before you start browsing, not during
• Titles that spell the color out get priority over titles that don’t
• If a photo and a title disagree, believe the title

The sub-line shortcut nobody uses

Eighteen of the hoodies have been pulled out of the main grid and filed on their own page as the Essentials 1977 Hoodie collection, priced from $⁠99 up to $⁠130. If the big front graphic is the whole reason you’re shopping, that page is the filtered version of the filter — eighteen items, one look, sorted for you. Starting there instead of the 113 saves the entire first round of cutting.

Works in reverse too. If you’d rather have something quieter, knowing that those eighteen are off in their own corner means the main page gets a bit less noisy once you mentally set them aside.

Why three finalists and not one

Because stock moves and sizes don’t wait for you. Most pieces here run S through XXL, though a listing can be thinner than that, so the size you want on your single favorite hoodie may simply not be there when you come back on Friday. If that happens and you only ever picked one, you’re starting the whole scroll again from the top, which is exactly the loop you were trying to avoid.

Three also lets you compare properly. With them open side by side the differences stop being abstract, because one title will say fleece and the next one knit and the third oversized, and at that point you’re choosing between three actual garments instead of ranking 113 photos against each other somewhere in the back of your head. Shipping and whatever the returns terms are only turn up at checkout, so read them there. Don’t take my word for any of it.

Last pass on the final three

Now put them somewhere. A February morning in Chicago at 25 °F wants the heaviest of the three with room for a shell over the top, which usually means sizing with layers in mind. A Houston evening in an over-air-conditioned office wants the thinnest one, and a pale color survives that better than black does. If all three pass the where-will-I-wear-this question, buy the one whose color you named first. You already made that decision two cuts ago.

And sleep on it if you’re torn. A hoodie you still want on Thursday morning is a different thing from one you wanted at midnight.

None of this takes longer than a couple of minutes once you’ve done it twice. Band, color, shortlist, done. Have a look through the hoodie page with that order in mind and see how much faster it goes than scrolling did.