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Abstract:
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Comfort in athletic apparel has gotten increased attention from the apparel market.
The tagline of 'performance' has taken on a more ubiquitous status within the athletic
apparel market as an alternative term to comfort. Comfort must be defined properly for this
product and measured in order to properly assess the products in this category. This
research seeks to determine what is considered comfortable in athletic performance apparel,
and to utilize the most appropriate and most advanced methods available to measure
comfort in a way which includes human input alongside test results.
The first step toward testing the comfort in this category was to determine what
aspects of comfort to test for as well as which test methods to use in the testing phase. This
began with a consumer market survey which asked the opinion on comfort issues in athletic
t-shirts of over 38,000 consumers in and outside of the United States. Four comfort aspects
were identified for measurement; in increasing order of consumer-identified importance
they were: Moisture Management, Cooling, and (Soft Hand and Breathable). Fit was
identified as the most important aspect by a wide margin; however the measurement of fit is
not included in the scope of this research.
The primary measurement emphasis for this research on the garment level was the
NCSU Sweating Thermal Manikin (Coppelius). Additional test methods used on the fabric
level were the Kawabata Evaluation System for the measurement of fabric hand (KES), the
Kawabata thermal sweating hot plate (Thermolabo), and the Gravimetric Absorbency
Testing System (GATS) with a coupled fabric drying test. These test measures were used
to compare fabric level results to garment level results as well as to provide information as
to how the fabric performed in the identified comfort aspect without regard to garment
construction.
The garments used in this research were all performance athletic apparel short
sleeved t-shirts for the purpose of running, with the exception of a 100% cotton t-shirt.
This exception was included for comparison from cotton to polyester shirts in this category.
The shirts were from various sources; specialty retailers, mass retailers, with varying price
ranges. The final sample set included seven shirts from seven different manufacturers,
made in seven different countries.
The results of this study provided information on target consumer groups within the
consumer survey based on purchase history data. The comfort preferences for these groups
were tracked and used in order to identify which samples from the sample set performed to
the highest level in the testing phase in light of the comfort preferences of these groups.
Moisture management was identified as a comfort aspect which was extremely important in
the review of literature to the overall comfort complex, however was quite undervalued by
the consumers, which points to a possible need for an increase in marketing emphasis on
this point. The manikin results had few correlations stronger than .7500, which is due to
garment construction, namely the presence of air in the manikin test which is not a factor in
fabric testing.
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