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Male vs. Female Buying Habits

Male vs. Female Buying Habits

My observations over the years

Xenia Chen
July 28, 2025

As we prepare for Fall (our busiest season of the year), I’ve been reflecting a lot on how our customers shop. We’ve tested various concepts and run several different types of promotions over the (almost) seven years we’ve been in business. Since we have a customer base that consists of both men and women, it’s been interesting to observe the difference in purchase and engagement patterns between the two genders.

I wanted to share a few of the most glaring and interesting ones below:

Men are more likely to roll the dice in the name of a deal.

Last Fall, we ran two special promotions to keep things fun for our community:

“Surprise Bundle” - A bundle of three pairs of tights at a really great deal, but you won’t know what you’ll be getting until you get the order in the mail. You leave it up to our fulfillment team to pick the randomized selection of tights for you.
“The Everything Bundle” - You get a pair of each style of tights that we have (so that’s 15 pairs in total) at 50% off regular price.

In both cases, you’re getting an incredible deal, but you risk getting a pair (or pairs) in your order that you may not normally choose. I bucket “The Everything Bundle” in this category because although the selection is pre-set, it is actually on the more rare side that someone will want to get every single pair as the styles vary in our collection (so someone who is loyal to the Contour collection tights will most likely not be as passionate about the Sheer-To-Waist tights). The interesting observation from these two promotions is that 95% of buyers of these two bundles were men. This tells me that men are more willing to roll the dice on the order in the name of steep savings.

On the flip side, our female customers seem to focus more on buying when the time is right/when they need to restock, versus taking advantage of a sale “just because”. Many of our most loyal female customers will buy in bulk at the beginning of the season and will restock only when needed. You often won’t see them take advantage of any promotions or sales.

Men tend to spend more and have more brand loyalty/enthusiasm.

Based on direct-to-consumer purchase data through our website, men are more likely to be high spenders. When you look at our top 20 customers by lifetime spend, 14 of them are men (70%). Not only are the men more likely to spend more, but it costs about the same to acquire a male customer vs. a female customer.

For a product like ours with a high repurchase rate, product loyalty is something all brands in our industry crave, but is relatively difficult to achieve due to it being a buyers’ market (a myriad of brands/choices) with negligible switching costs. To illustrate this, when I sent out my initial consumer research survey back in 2018, fewer than 5% of respondents said they were brand loyal to any brand of tights, although 100% of the respondents were women (I had no knowledge of the male customer base back in 2018).

Based on our internal data, it seems like we’ve been able to achieve a relatively high degree of brand loyalty with our male community. This is most likely also influenced by the absence of choice for men, as many more hosiery brands market to women than to men.

The reviews that are written by men are almost always longer in word count than reviews written by women (and by a decent margin), and while this is far from an official metric used to evaluate customer segments, it does allude to the sentiment that men are more passionate and enthusiastic about the product and our brand.

Men love gamified promotions.

Promotions formatted as “games” are also more likely to be loved by men. A few years ago, we had a scavenger hunt through our email marketing campaigns over the course of a few weeks in December. It was free to participate and if you were able to find all five codes embedded in our emails, you would get a free gift card. Virtually all participants who made it all the way through were men. We also ran a weekly brain teaser for many years that involved a chance to win a free pair of tights (if you answered correctly), and ~75% of regular respondents were men.

Women are more likely to tell a friend or give a referral.

Despite men being more likely to write a more compelling review and engage in our online marketing campaigns, we’ve found word-of-mouth referrals to mostly come from women. That being said, this stat is skewed because a sizable portion of our male customer community is more private about wearing tights, and may not feel comfortable sharing the brand with their family and friends.

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Men and women are equally as important to our brand and we feel grateful to have such an engaged community that includes all genders. The fun thing about running a business like this is that we’re constantly learning new things about our demographic. I’m sure I’ll have more findings in a few years, or even after this upcoming Fall season.

If you’re interested in learning more about our male demographic, I recently recorded a YouTube episode where I cover all things men, here. If you watch it, I’d love to hear what you think!