30 Days of Selvedge Prices: What the Data Actually Shows

The numbers below are a snapshot of our first 30 days (Aug 15 - Sep 14, 2026). For always-current figures over a rolling window, see the live price report.

For the past 30 days we have recorded a daily price and stock snapshot for every selvedge product we track - 2,923 products across roughly 70 stores and 160 brands, 12,593 snapshots in total. This is the first report from that data. The short version: almost nothing goes on sale, prices move up nearly as often as they move down, and the thing that actually disappears is not the product - it is your size.

A note on method before the numbers: we only count a price change as real if the new price shows up in two consecutive daily snapshots. One-day blips, cart-price games, and scraping glitches do not make it into these figures.

Finding 1: 97.6% of selvedge did not drop in price

Out of 2,823 products with enough history to judge, exactly 68 had a verified price drop in 30 days. That is 2.4%.

If you are used to mainstream fashion retail, where something is always 40% off somewhere, selvedge works differently. Most of these products are made in small batches by mills and brands with no clearance calendar. The price on the tag in August was, for 24 out of every 25 products, still the price in September.

The practical read: waiting for a sale on a specific pair is mostly not a strategy. It is a lottery with a 1-in-40 monthly ticket.

Finding 2: when drops happen, they are real

The 68 drops that did happen were not token discounts:

Drops also cluster. A single retailer marking down a line accounts for a meaningful chunk of a month's total - in this window, one stockist's Japan Blue sale produced a run of identical 30% cuts by itself. Sales in this niche are events at specific shops, not a market-wide rhythm.

A few of the verified drops from this window, with live prices:

Finding 3: prices rise almost as often as they fall

This is the number that surprised us: alongside 68 verified drops, we recorded 38 verified price increases, with a median rise of 5.5%.

Between mill costs, yen movement, and small brands repricing infrequently but decisively, the direction of selvedge pricing is not down. For every two products that got cheaper last month, one got more expensive. Waiting is not free.

Finding 4: your size sells out 13x more often than the product does

The stock side of the data is the strongest argument for paying attention:

Full sellouts are rare. Size runs breaking is constant - about 45 size-availability changes per day across the catalog. And of the 106 products that fully sold out, only 12 returned within the window (median 5.5 days when they did). In small-batch denim, sold out mostly means gone.

The pattern that emerges: the product page will still be there next month, at the same price or higher, missing your size.

What we would do with this data

• If a pair you want exists in your size at a price you can live with, the data says the odds favor buying it over waiting.

• If the price is genuinely out of reach, watch it instead of checking back manually - watchlist alerts fire only on the verified two-snapshot drops counted above, so an alert means a real markdown, not noise.

• The current verified drops are always on the deals page, sorted by how deep the cut is, with trailing-median context shown once a product has enough history.

Method and caveats

Data covers August 15 to September 14, 2026: daily snapshots of every tracked product across the store directory and brand catalogs. A price change counts only when confirmed in two consecutive snapshots. Thirty days is one late-summer month - no seasonal claims here. We will publish the 90-day version, including whether Black Friday actually reaches selvedge, in mid-November.