ROMWE

FASHION | THE STANDARD » By Jennie Wong

My foray into online shopping: my ROMWE.com experience.

As a girl who worked 6 years in brick & mortar retail stores, I’m not a huge fan of online shopping for goods I can’t see or touch. But working at a dot com and recognizing the changing retail landscape have pushed me to consider online as another shopping outlet.

I first heard of ROMWE via xteeener and was reintroduced by my friend at work, Audrey. ROMWE is a street style fashion inspired ecommerce site that ships in small batches from China. Its clothing is featured in streetstyle blogs like Stylenanda and Lookbook.nu. I decided to give it a go and shopped with my new user 20% new user discount.

I found the website cluttered and uninspired but the selection wide and interesting. The styles featured are like a cross between urban funk and punk rock: think skulls, technicolor unicorns, and oversized neon. The price point, for goods from China, are relatively high - about $40-50 for a sweater. I took this as an indicator of quality (TBD). Another plus for the site: most of the tops are ONE SIZE only, so I didn’t have to guess.

The 3 sweathers (sweater+weather) I ordered arrived in the mail approximately 4 weeks after order confirmation. For a package shipping from China, this was understood. The sweaters were packaged neatly in clear plastic bags with slider zips and cardboard backing. Aside from the packaging, I was also impressed by the quality: surprisingly good knits and passable construction. Unfortunately, 2 out of 3 of the sweaters had a poor fit. One didn’t drape well and the other didn’t look like how it did on the site. This resulted in a long “How do I return?” chain with customer service and 2 trips to the Post Office, plus a $60 return shipping fee. Let’s just say that for the 1 sweater I did keep, the price of not being able to touch, feel, and try something on IRL was not worth it.

ROMWE didn’t work for me, but if you’re good with generic fits and never return anything, this is good. It’s fun to get something you feel no one else has, and hey, you can tell them you were the first to shop ROMWE.

ROMWE, ROMWE.com