Seventy hoodies, one page, and somewhere around the fourth row of scrolling they all start blurring into the same garment. That’s more or less where I gave up on browsing properly the first time I went through the fleece listings at Essential Hoodie, because a catalogue that size doesn’t reward patience so much as quietly punish it, and the part nobody warns you about is that you’re not really choosing between seventy hoodies. You’re choosing between four or five colours you’d genuinely wear and sixty-odd you wouldn’t.
Seventy options are harder than seven
A short list makes you decide. A long one lets you postpone, which is why I closed that tab twice before buying anything at all. Give somebody seven pullovers, and they’ll compare them properly, pick one and get on with their evening. Give them seventy and the brain stops comparing altogether and switches into skimming, and skimming is how people end up owning the colour that photographed beautifully rather than the colour they’d reach for on a Wednesday morning.
The grid itself can’t really help, either, and not because anyone built it badly. Every tile shows the same thing structurally — same oversized cut, same dropped shoulder, same kangaroo pocket landing in the same spot, same drawcord through the hood. Only the colour changes. And colour happens to be the hardest property to judge from a thumbnail on a phone screen.
Colour ends up doing all the sorting
One quirk of this particular catalogue pushes you here whether you want it or not. The whole Essentials Hoodie category holds at C$99, so the price can’t rank a single thing for you, and the fit question has more or less one answer across the range because Essentials cuts everything loose anyway. Take those two away and the colourway is what’s left. That’s the entire decision.
What a product photo tells you, and what it doesn’t
Photos come out honest about hue and fairly unreliable about depth. A mid-grey under bright studio lighting reads a couple of shades lighter than it hangs in your hallway, and the dark end of any range compresses on screen until charcoal, deep brown and near-black look like three photographs of one hoodie. So I’ve started trusting the colour names more than the images, since a name like heather grey carries information that lighting can flatten right out of a picture.
Grey keeps winning, and the reason is dull
Grey outsells the rest of this line fairly reliably, and I’d guess the reason has more to do with laundry than with taste. A week of Toronto sidewalks leaves salt spray over everything you own, and grey hides that in a way black genuinely doesn’t, which is black’s one real flaw given that it photographs better than anything else on the page. Mid-grey also reads neutral enough that nobody clocks you in the same pullover three days running, and that, honestly, is most of what anybody wants from an Essentials Hoodie they bought to wear rather than to think about.
Four piles, not seventy choices
When I’ve narrowed a grid this size down, and I’ve done it more than once, the colours collapse into about four useful piles long before I get to the bottom of the page.
- The neutral greys, which go under everything and forgive a Canadian winter
- Black and the near-blacks, sharp in the photograph and high-maintenance on a coat rack
- Warm earth tones — sands, taupes, the browns — which suit more complexions than people expect
- The loud ones, which are genuinely good fun and get worn roughly a tenth as often
The second shop carries a different spread
Worth knowing that this isn’t the only Canadian page carrying the line, and the two don’t stock the same colours. The hoodie listings over at Essentials Hoodie sit in a higher band, somewhere around C$111 to C$120 as a rough figure, with its 1977 pieces climbing further again, and its categories run through tees, sweatshirts and tracksuits as well. So price does a bit of ranking there that a flat grid refuses to do.
| Pro Tip: When two colourways genuinely tie, I stop opening tabs and open the wardrobe instead. Whichever one already has three things hanging next to it wins, because that’s the one you’ll pull on without thinking about it. |
The order I work through it in
My own sequence runs backwards from how most people shop a big page. I start by ruling out. Anything I wouldn’t put on in a Vancouver drizzle or a Calgary cold snap goes straight away, which clears most of the brighter tiles inside a minute and leaves the page feeling manageable for the first time.
Then I cut the near-duplicates. A grid this deep will hold four greys separated by a shade that nobody except you would ever notice, so keeping one of the four and dropping the other three costs you precisely nothing. What survives that pass is usually eight or nine pieces, and at eight pieces I’m comparing things again rather than skimming past them, which was the whole object of the exercise.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a rarer colourway cost more on that grid?
It doesn’t, and that’s the odd bit, because you’d half expect a scarcer colour to carry some sort of premium. The hoodie category holds at C$99 the whole way down those seventy listings, with the nine 1977 pieces sitting at the same figure, so the plainest grey costs you precisely what the shade nobody else has costs you.
How close is the on-screen colour to the garment that turns up?
Close enough on hue, and a fair bit shakier on depth, going by catalogues shot this way. Mid-tones tend to photograph lighter than they hang, and the dark end flattens into itself, so I’ve got into the habit of reading the colour name about as carefully as I look at the picture.
Is a neutral the sensible first Essentials Hoodie?
Nine times out of ten I’d say yes, though it does depend on how much you already own. A grey or a sand colourway sits happily with whatever’s in there, and the second one you buy can be as loud as you fancy once you’ve worked out how the cut falls on your shoulders.
And if the colour I want has sold out on both pages?
I’d wait it out rather than compromise, since these grids do restock and a shade you only settled for tends to stay on the hanger anyway. The shop allows fourteen days from delivery to send something back, which isn’t really a long enough window to treat a purchase as a trial run.
Seventy tiles on one page is really a merchandising decision rather than a puzzle you’re obliged to finish, which took me an embarrassingly long while to accept. I’d knock the page down by season first, then by whatever’s already hanging in the wardrobe, and when two pictures still look more or less identical I’d let the colour name settle it. The grey you’d pull on for a dull Montreal morning tends to beat the striking one you photograph once and then forget about, and that bit of arithmetic doesn’t shift much depending on which of the two shops you end up buying an Essentials Hoodie from.
