71. Mannequins

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things: Episode 71 - Mannequins

Introduction

In Episode 71 of The Economics of Everyday Things, journalist Zachary Crockett delves into the seemingly mundane yet economically significant world of mannequins. Through insightful discussions with Stacy Bourne, Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Creative at Fusion Specialties—the world's largest manufacturer of mannequins—and Judy Henderson, founder of Mannequin Madness, Crockett uncovers the intricate dynamics that make mannequins a cornerstone of the retail industry.

The Role of Mannequins in Retail

Mannequins play a pivotal role in retail environments, acting as silent but effective sales agents. Zachary Crockett opens the episode by highlighting their ubiquitous presence:

"A Stroll through any mall or shopping center in America and you'll find yourself surrounded by an army of plastic salespeople." [00:32]

Stacy Bourne adds to this by explaining their impact on consumer behavior:

"If people say to me, I was in that store and I didn't notice the mannequins, but you know what? Their clothes look so good, I ended up spending like way too much money on four different outfits." [01:36]

History and Evolution of Mannequins

Crockett traces the origins of mannequins back to 19th-century dress forms used by tailors in Paris and London. These early versions were rudimentary, lacking limbs and heads, and served primarily to display garments. As mass production of clothing surged in the early 20th century, mannequins evolved to become more lifelike with added features like glass eyes and wigs. By the 1960s, designers like Adol Rootstein were creating mannequins modeled after famous personalities, enhancing their realism and appeal.

Fusion Specialties: Innovation in Mannequin Manufacturing

In the mid-1980s, Fusion Specialties emerged as a leader in mannequin manufacturing by addressing the industry's need for innovation. Stacy Bourne explains how Fusion revolutionized the process:

"They said, how can we make this product so easy to use? That isn't going to cause a lot of breakage, isn't going to cause a lot of poorly set up mannequins." [05:45]

Traditional mannequins posed challenges, particularly with assembling arms via cumbersome keyhole fittings. Fusion introduced magnetic arms and single-piece constructions, simplifying setup and reducing breakage. This innovation allowed even untrained employees to create attractive displays efficiently.

Economic Impact: Costs and Customization

Mannequins are a significant investment for retailers, with Fusion Specialties producing approximately 25,000 full-form equivalent (FFE) mannequins annually:

"We probably make somewhere around 25,000 FFES, which is what we call a full form equivalent. A full mannequin." [07:31]

The cost of Fusion mannequins ranges from $450 to $1,300, reflecting factors like manufacturing complexity and customization levels. Custom mannequins are tailored to align with a brand's aesthetic and target demographic. For instance, luxury brands like Burberry and Louis Vuitton opt for high-end mannequins crafted from premium materials such as leather and wood, costing several thousand dollars each. In contrast, mainstream brands like The Gap and Nike require mannequins that are relatable and suitable for high-volume production.

Current Trends in Mannequin Design

The mannequin industry is adapting to evolving consumer expectations and market demands. There is a growing emphasis on inclusive sizing and diverse body types to better represent a wider customer base. Bourne notes:

"Inclusive sizing not only for women, but also for men." [13:11]

Additionally, the designs are becoming more dynamic and realistic to reflect specific sports or activities, enhancing authenticity in displays. For example, action sports brands require mannequins that accurately depict athletic poses to resonate with their audience.

Environmental Impact and Recycling

The environmental footprint of mannequin production and disposal is a growing concern. Traditional mannequins, often made from fiberglass, pose significant disposal challenges due to their non-biodegradable nature. Fusion Specialties addresses this by promoting recycling and partnering with programs that can repurpose or safely dispose of old mannequins:

"Depending on the material that you have, you can potentially recycle it... We send it to a program that literally takes these mannequins and incinerates them and creates energy for the power grid from them." [20:17]

This approach not only mitigates environmental impact but also aligns with retailers' sustainability goals.

The Second Life of Mannequins: Mannequin Madness

Judy Henderson's venture, Mannequin Madness, exemplifies the second life of mannequins. Frustrated by the waste generated from discarded mannequins, Henderson began collecting them from major retailers like Sears, Ralph Lauren, and Macy's. Over 25 years, she has amassed millions of mannequins, repurposing them for various creative and functional uses:

"Most of our used full size mannequins are in like the $100 range and under." [18:27]

Her clientele spans small to mid-sized retailers, museums, fashion designers, and hobbyists. She transforms mannequins into unique items such as planters, art installations, and even functional furniture, showcasing the versatility and enduring value of these displays.

Conclusion

Mannequins, often overlooked, are integral to the retail ecosystem. From their historical roots to modern innovations and sustainability efforts, they embody a blend of economics, creativity, and practicality. Through the lens of Fusion Specialties and Mannequin Madness, this episode illuminates the complex yet fascinating journey of mannequins in shaping consumer experiences and retail success.

Notable Quotes

• "A Stroll through any mall or shopping center in America and you'll find yourself surrounded by an army of plastic salespeople." — Zachary Crockett [00:32]
• "If people say to me, I was in that store and I didn't notice the mannequins, but you know what? Their clothes look so good, I ended up spending like way too much money on four different outfits." — Stacy Bourne [01:36]
• "Inclusive sizing not only for women, but also for men." — Stacy Bourne [13:11]
• "Depending on the material that you have, you can potentially recycle it... We send it to a program that literally takes these mannequins and incinerates them and creates energy for the power grid from them." — Stacy Bourne [20:17]
• "Most of our used full size mannequins are in like the $100 range and under." — Judy Henderson [18:27]

Final Thoughts

Mannequins may stand silently in store windows, but their influence on retail strategy and consumer behavior is profound. This episode of The Economics of Everyday Things not only highlights their economic significance but also underscores the innovative and sustainable strides being made in their production and lifecycle management.

Transcript

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[Zachary Crockett]

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[Stacy Bourne]

I know I've done my job well. If people say to me, I was in that store and I didn't notice the mannequins, but you know what? Their clothes look so good, I ended up spending like way too much money on four different outfits.

[Zachary Crockett]

Stacy Bourne is the vice president of sales, marketing and creative at Fusion Specialties, the largest manufacturer of mannequins in the world.

[Stacy Bourne]

If you can think of some of the top athletic brands, the top big box brands in an average American mall, we've probably done 80% of those stores at one time or another. We're not selling them mannequins, we're selling them a vehicle on which to display their product.

[Zachary Crockett]

The reality of retail is this. Lots of consumers shop directly off the mannequins in the display windows.

[Stacy Bourne]

And the reasons for that make sense, right? If it's styled well, then people just go, ooh, I want to look like that. I'm just going to look for everything that's on that mannequin.

[Zachary Crockett]

While commerce is increasingly shifting online, the majority of fashion sales still happen at physical stores. And for retailers, mannequins are a Central, but often overlooked part of the bottom line.

[Stacy Bourne]

If you're looking at what retailers are putting on mannequins, you can see anywhere from a 10 to 40% upsell on that particular item that they're selling.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the Freakonomics radio network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, mannequins. Modern mannequins trace their roots to dress forms used by tailors, clothiers in 19th century Paris and London. Pinned garments on molded torsos made of wood, papier mache or even wax. Human shapes without arms, legs or heads. These were mounted on posts and eventually displayed in the first shop windows. When the mass production of clothing began in the early 20th century, mannequins evolved. Soon the figures not only had heads and limbs, but glass eyes and even wigs. In the 1960s, they acquired nipples. Top mannequin designer Adol Rootstein developed mannequins modeled on famous women, including the model Twiggy and the actress Joan Collins. Mannequins were carefully dressed and arranged by professionals.

[Stacy Bourne]

When you look back into the age of department stores before the big mall chain retailer, they hired stylists and visual merchandisers who would go in and dress mannequins, style wigs and style makeup to be on trend and to match outfits.

[Zachary Crockett]

In the following decades, the rise of malls and big box retail chains caused a spike in demand for mannequins. Stores went from buying three or four of them to ordering them by the truckload. With the increase in volume, mannequins became more generic, less like life sized dolls and more like the anonymous stand ins we see today. And the way that stores handled their mannequins changed too.

[Stacy Bourne]

When you look at the US marketplace and the malls of the 80s and 90s, that's when the visual merchandising employee kind of started to fall away really. The people working in most retail mall stores were teenagers or part time employees who didn't have a lot of time because they were there to set the floor, to stock the floor and to sell through as well. They also had to dress in mannequins and visual merchandising wasn't their expertise.

[Zachary Crockett]

Fusion specialties came along in the midst of these trends. The company was founded in the mid-80s by two entrepreneurs who recognized that the product was ripe for innovation.

[Stacy Bourne]

They said, how can we make this product so easy to use? That isn't going to cause a lot of breakage, isn't going to cause a lot of poorly set up mannequins.

[Zachary Crockett]

Traditional mannequins had a lot of problems, starting with the arms. They had to be attached using keyhole fittings. You put the little post that's on one piece into the hole on the other and then slide it into a locked position.

[Stacy Bourne]

Very easy to do when the mannequin's naked, but when the mannequin is dressed under layers of clothing and you're doing it blind, I mean, it's really difficult to do.

[Zachary Crockett]

Fusion's mannequins were easier to use. They featured magnetic arms that snapped into place and a single piece construction rather than one that was split at the waist. With these developments, even an untrained 17 year old with a part time summer job could assemble an attractive display.

[Stacy Bourne]

They're really easy to dress or flip over. Do what you have to do.

[Zachary Crockett]

Today, mannequins are a $5 billion global industry. Whether you're talking about a full body head to toe, or just a lone hand in the window of a jewelry shop, Mannequins are everywhere, from discount clothing stores to the private showrooms of design houses. At the highest end of the market, you have companies like Bonaveri who make mannequins for luxury brands like burberry and Louis vuitton. They're crafted in Italy using materials like leather and wood and cost a few thousand dollars each. Then there are firms like fusion specialties that work in much higher volumes with mainstream brands like the gap, Nike, Abercrombie and fitch, Victoria's secret and target.

[Stacy Bourne]

I would say on an annual basis, we probably make somewhere around 25,000 FFES, which is what we call a full form equivalent. A full mannequin.

[Zachary Crockett]

It's a whole army.

[Stacy Bourne]

Yes, it's a lot of bodies.

[Zachary Crockett]

Fusion specialties mannequins cost anywhere from $450 to $1,300 a piece. That range reflects the difficulty of manufacturing and the level of customization.

[Stacy Bourne]

The whole point of a custom mannequin is that you put your clothing on and it fits. What are the ideal body types? What is the, you know, there's inspirational and aspirational, and where within that realm do you want to fall? Right. A tall, lean mannequin is pretty close to what you'll always see in a high fashion brand. Someone like, you know, a gap or a abercrombie, maybe you have less tall and lean and more relatable to the American consumer. And then of course, in athletic, you start looking about, you know, what's inspirational in an athletic body. Sometimes we bring models in, whether that's in groups or individually.

[Zachary Crockett]

So some of these mannequins you see at a major retail store could be a real person somewhere out in the world.

[Stacy Bourne]

Absolutely.

[Zachary Crockett]

This design and sculpting process takes place at Fusion's creative studios just outside of Denver.

[Stacy Bourne]

Most sculptors came to us with a fine arts background. You'd see armatures in clay and cast heads and hands and feet. The nice thing about a clay sculpt is you can dress it. So we might choose to go down the clay path. And then as technology has changed, so has our process to also include digital sculpting. So we have 3D printers in house, and whether it's a clay sculpt or a 3D print, it then goes back to our workshop. They are taking these sculpts and creating master prototypes from them.

[Zachary Crockett]

And outside of these custom orders, is there a standard mannequin that people can just order?

[Stacy Bourne]

Absolutely. There's a lot of brands out there who don't have the budget or the quantities, so we do have a large amount of offerings in our catalog.

[Zachary Crockett]

Across the market, more than half of mannequins sold today are still made out of fiberglass, which can be delicate and labor intensive to make. Fusion Specialty's founders, though, pioneered the use of plastics early on.

[Stacy Bourne]

They worked with chemical companies around the globe and found they could do rotational molding at room temperature, so it didn't require a lot of heating and cooling and big ovenry and that sort of thing.

[Zachary Crockett]

It also enabled a more advanced level of sculpting.

[Stacy Bourne]

How much realism of that body do you want to show? One of the things our material has allowed us to do is create these very dynamic mannequins that show a lot of movement. If you are an action sports brand, is there a specific sport that you're trying to emulate? The authenticity of that pose is incredibly important. If you were to put a golf mannequin in a golf pro shop, every single golfer who walks into that golf shop is going to have an opinion about if that is a good swing or not.

[Zachary Crockett]

Once the team has finalized a prototype, it's shipped to the company's manufacturing facility in Juarez, Mexico, where it's tooled for mass production.

[Stacy Bourne]

We can create a mannequin approximately every 18 minutes from that mold. It then goes to a polishing finishing line, so seam lines are sanded off, the form is painted, and then it's packaged and shipped out the door.

[Zachary Crockett]

There are all kinds of mannequins out there that anyone can buy. At the online retailer mannequinmall.com you can find categories like realistic, abstract, and egghead flexible, athletic, sexy, African American child and baby, something called Invisible Ghost and lots more.

[Stacy Bourne]

One of the trends that we see a lot is headed mannequins versus headless mannequins because so much of what retailers sell is the additional merchandise, the hats, the sunglasses. Almost everything that we do now has a head, most of which are eggheads. So faceless, just round heads. So many stores are really speaking to such a diverse customer base. Now we are starting to see more a resurgence of skin tones entering the market. Again, gender neutral mannequins are a huge topic of discussion.

[Zachary Crockett]

Brands can aim for a wider customer base by being visually vague, or they can target a specific demographic by creating certain features, colors or shapes for their mannequins. They can also expand their market with new sizing. In 2019, Nike caused a stir by introducing its own plus sized mannequins in its London flagship store. This came two years after the company released its first collection of plus sized apparel.

[Stacy Bourne]

That is certainly a large part of our focus right now. Inclusive sizing not only for women, but also for men.

[Zachary Crockett]

And sometimes a trend is not about size as much as shape.

[Stacy Bourne]

I mean, I can't tell you how many times we worked for brands that asked for a J. Lo butt as that was becoming popular.

[Zachary Crockett]

The nature of shifting tastes in emerging market segments means that mannequin preferences are always changing. So where's an older mannequin to go? That's coming up.

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[Zachary Crockett]

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[Judy Henderson]

The department stores would just routinely throw away their mannequins if they closed or remodeled. So I convinced retail stores to say, hey, why don't you let me have your mannequins for free.

[Zachary Crockett]

Henderson discovered that retailers were happy to pass off their inventory because it saved them thousands of dollars in disposal fees. So she set out to collect as many of them as she could.

[Judy Henderson]

Sears was getting rid of mannequins out of all of their stores and my ex and I rented a cargo van and rent to every Sears store within a 50 mile radius and just collected mannequins. Ralph Lauren was the next biggest one, then Macy's Nordstrom. We developed a network with other used mannequin vendors across the country. We created a relationship. So let's say the Gap was remodeling mannequins out of all their stores. They only had to call me and I would arrange the pickup at all their different locations because I had someone in each major region.

[Zachary Crockett]

If you had to throw out just a totally wild guess, how Many mannequins would you say have passed through your hands over the last 25 years?

[Judy Henderson]

Oh, my God, millions. Millions.

[Zachary Crockett]

Today, Henderson runs a company called Mannequin Madness. She's in the business of recycling and repurposing old mannequins. And at her warehouse in Oakland, California, she's got rows and rows and rows of them.

[Judy Henderson]

They're just body parts all over the place. You may see, you know, something upside down, something sideways, things stacked on top of each other. I don't want to say it's like a morgue, but some people kind of likened it to that. To me, it's just day in the life, you know, they're like giant Barbie dolls to me.

[Zachary Crockett]

Henderson offers these mannequins for a fraction of what they would cost new.

[Judy Henderson]

Most of our used full size mannequins are in like the $100 range and under. I can have something for as cheap as 20 bucks. And then I've got some that's got all the bells and whistles that might be somewhere in the neighborhood of $200.

[Zachary Crockett]

Her customers are all over the map.

[Judy Henderson]

The bulk of our business is the small to mid size retailer, but we also have museums. Then we have fashion designers and we have fashion schools, photographers. We have people who are doing trade shows, of course, all the people who are selling on Etsy and Poshmark and ebay.

[Zachary Crockett]

She's also found a market with hobbyists.

[Judy Henderson]

It's amazing the fascination that we have with the human body and what people will do in a creative way for either functional purposes like a table or something artistic like making a dress from Christmas tree leg forms which are just from the waist down for displaying pants. A lot of people like to make planters out of those. They'll cut out the top and they'll put either fake or real plants coming out of them.

[Zachary Crockett]

For Henderson's retailer clients, there's also an environmental incentive.

[Judy Henderson]

The average mannequin weighs about 25 pounds. They're made out of materials that take like thousands of years before it'll biodegrade. Think about it. Fiberglass just doesn't really biodegrade the same material that you would make with a surfboard. They just don't break down.

[Zachary Crockett]

Mannequin manufacturers are aware of the ecological footprint of their industry. Some firms have developed mannequins from materials that are biodegradable or that can be industrially recycled. And Fusion Specialties refers its clients to a variety of programs that can assist with disposal.

[Stacy Bourne]

We call it End of Life.

[Zachary Crockett]

Again, that's Stacey Bourne.

[Stacy Bourne]

Depending on the material that you have, you can potentially recycle it. If it's a thermoplastic, you can send it back to be chopped or reground and put back into the mannequin stream or just the general plastic stream. There's a lot of mannequin materials that don't fall under any kind of recycling program. So we send it to a program that literally takes these mannequins and incinerates them and creates energy for the power grid from them.

[Zachary Crockett]

They also work with used mannequin brokers like Judy Henderson.

[Stacy Bourne]

We work really well together because sometimes there's just some needs that we can't meet, whether it's timing or, you know, old product that maybe we don't have anymore. So we send people to Judy and then she sends people to us.

[Judy Henderson]

Sometimes after up 20 years, I still get excited if I get called to go into a store and find their mannequins in a basement. Some people like saving the whales. I love saving the mannequins.

[Zachary Crockett]

For a mannequin, this retirement marks the end of a largely thankless career. It spends years on the front lines of retail, selling shirts, pants, and jackets, often without much credit in the trade. It's sometimes said that a good mannequin should almost be invisible, but for the people who play a hand in manufacturing, selling, and upcycling them, they're always center stage.

[Stacy Bourne]

I'm out there all the time, you know, to the shock and horror of my children. Sometimes if something's stayed strong or an arm isn't fitting in, I just go over and fix the mannequins myself. Once you've been in this business, you can't walk into a store without noticing the mannequins.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Robson and thanks to listener Melissa Wilson, who suggested this topic. If you have a suggestion for an episode, feel free to email us at everydaythingsreakonomics.com Our inbox is always open. All right, until next week. What's, like, the weirdest request you've ever gotten?

[Stacy Bourne]

You don't want to hear.

[Zachary Crockett]

All right, I think I know where you're going with this.

[Stacy Bourne]

Yep, when you say mannequins, people get some wild ideas sometimes. The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of Everything Everything.

[Zachary Crockett]

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