Lands' End

Pros:  good clothes, stable site, nice service

Cons:  hard to use site and extra features make it hard to navigate

The Bottom Line:  It's not the Amazon of online clothing stores. But if you want access to their inexpensive clothes and don't have a catalog nearby, it's an acceptable choice.

Full review
Well, friends, I beg to differ. While I appreciate the midwestern friendliness of the telephone personalities at Land's End, and their perrenial sponsorship of Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion on NPR, I cannot for the life of me use this site without getting confused.

For example

Thanks to my company's new "casual day, every day" policy, I have to replace all my dry cleanable button downs and ties with more homey clothes. The first part of that uniform? Khakis.

Now I was a pretty good speller back in school, but the above color always gives me trouble. So when I went to the site and found the well-hidden search box, I naturally typed in the first phonic that popped into my head: kakhis.

No results. Silly me. I went to dictionary.com to discover my faux paux.

Going back to the site, I type in khakis. The first results I get are women's pants. Oh! I realize I have to select the men's section first in a separate menu before I type in my search terms. I do this and get a result list that includes, I kid you not, belts. Ever see a kakhi belt before? Well, you won't on Lands End. They don't offer one. Why belts appear in the results list I'll never know.

So, what to do?

Lands End has this neat little feature where, depending on the time of day, you can either talk to a live person by phone, or have a little text chat with them. Since I couldn't quite get my search results the way I wanted, I decided to have a chat with someone, who for privacy reasons, I've named Marianne M (for reasons of confusion, the most recent text appears at the top. You can read the conversation going back in time):



Marianne M: Is there anything else I may help you with?
Marianne M: Yes, we did. Thank you.
Marianne M: Yes, it actually does...I forgot until you asked.
Sgersh: great! hey, we both learned something new today!
Sgersh: ah, so the search thingy works?
Marianne M: From the search results page click on the item name to view size and color.
Marianne M: I sent the page for the search result "khaki pants". Again, you need to select the style and verify avaialbility of that color.
Sgersh: anything else i should know?
Sgersh: hm. oh well.
Marianne M: No, I apologize for the inconvenience but you need to select style first.
Sgersh: is there a way to search for all pants that come in kahki using your nifty search thingy?
Marianne M: (Ignore the y, I was typing on another window - or so I thought!)
Marianne M: No, I apologize for the inconvenience but you need to select style first.
Marianne M: y
Sgersh: rather not pick a style and find it's not available in that color, you know
Sgersh: well, i'd rather pick a style that is just available in kakhi. is there a way to do that Marianne?
Marianne M: No, first you decide which style you would like then check for size and color.
Sgersh: are all these pants available in kakhi?
Marianne M: Is there anything else I may help you with?
Marianne M: I have shared the page for Men's Pants.
Sgersh: i'm looking for some kakhi pants
Marianne M: Welcome to Lands' End Live! How may I help you?


A bit more folksy than the search engine, but the same result.

Other things

I get confused easily. Must have been all those ho hos in my childhood. The interface is cluttered with all sorts of stuff that shouldn't be there. Like when I'm finally narrowing down on a pair of jeans, there are at least 50 links on the page. A good sales person closes the sale quickly, then offers add-ons. These folks make it as easy for me to "join their affiliate program" (whatever that means), than to check out.


I may be spreading out in my old age, which is why I'm not longer sure of my sizes. When I turn to the friendly folks at Lands End for help in determining my size, they get positively scientific on me:


To get accurate body measurements, use a dimensionally stable cloth tape measure, keeping the tape taut but not stretched. Get a friend to help, if possible, measuring your body over properly-fitting undergarments while standing erect, without shoes, and with feet approximately 6 inches (15 cm) apart.


I just want to buy some pants: not launch a space shuttle. How about some of that folksy language to tell me what you all really want?

Delivery and Service

Lands End, as an experienced catalog company, has plenty of experience in delivery and service. The pants I ordered came hemmed and cuffed just the way I wanted. They didn't fit very well, but those are the chances you take when you buy from flatland online and not from a 3D store where they have those tiny little dressing rooms with the 1860's era saloon-style swinging doors and funhouse mirrors that make Calista Flockhart look fat.

Still, I was a bit irked that when I ordered, they couldn't tell me when I'd get the pants. They arrived a day late, which for me, a procrastinator, was about 6 hours past the time when I was taking a flight to a place where I really needed those pants. Oh well.

The upshot

I think Lands End has done an acceptable, though not by any stretch, admirable, translation of their catalog to the online world. They have features (discussed in other, more glowing reviews) that seem really neat until you start using them (like a program that lets you design a virtual "you" that lets you try on the "virtual" pants and lets you realize how "virtually" big your rear end is on the computer screen).

For the reasons of confusion and clutter, I cannot recommend this site to anyone, except me, who would rather sleep in a bed full of cockroaches than to approach the local shopping mall on a weekend afternoon to try on pants.

I'd rather have an Amazon-type site. They could even infuse it with some kind of ironic humor:

"People who bought pants like this also bought oversize shirts and went on a diet."

But I know that kind of truth in sales would never happen. Would it?