Airlines take note: leggings sales are sky high with no signs of losing altitude

United Airlines sparked a major Twitterstorm, #leggingsgate, yesterday by banning two girls in leggings from boarding a flight, citing a policy about appropriate clothing. Bad news for the airline — yoga pants are more popular than ever. As we reported back in October, women ordered more leggings than jeans online in the Fall of 2016. And new data from Slice Intelligence shows that the leggings market climbed 38 percent year-over-year from 2016 to 2017.

As is the case with the entire online apparel category, Amazon was the top leggings seller in 2016. What’s more interesting is that the retail giant was followed closely by Nordstrom and American Eagle--retailers that are especially popular among the Millennial and Gen X shoppers that comprise nearly three quarters of all leggings sales.

With a panel of over 4.7 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.

Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for the NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.