Two training tops can be made in the same factory, from the same fabric roll, by the same machinist. One sells for £18 and one for £65. That happens more often than most people assume, and it is the reason "you get what you pay for" is unreliable advice in sportswear.
Price is a signal about a brand's marketing budget, retail markup and order volume at least as much as it is a signal about the garment. So it helps to know what to look at instead.
Rough shape of it for most apparel brands: the garment itself is a minority of the retail price. Then you have shipping and duty, warehousing, returns, payment fees, and marketing. If a brand sells through retailers rather than direct, wholesale margin roughly doubles the price again before it reaches a shop floor.
Athlete sponsorship, paid social and heavy discounting all get funded from that same pot. A brand spending forty percent of revenue acquiring customers has to charge for it somewhere, and it is not going to come out of their margin.
This is why direct-to-consumer brands and supermarket-scale operations like Decathlon can undercut heritage names without the garment being worse. It is also why some small brands are expensive despite being unremarkable: low order volumes mean they pay far more per unit than a brand ordering fifty thousand pieces.
GSM means grams per square metre. It is the single most useful number on a spec sheet and most brands do not publish it, which tells you something.
A summer training tee sits around 120 to 160 GSM. A midweight everyday tee is 180 to 220. A proper heavyweight hoodie is 350 GSM and up, and anything sold as a hoodie under 280 will feel thin the moment you handle it. Leggings and compression pieces usually land between 200 and 280.
Heavier is not automatically better. A 200 GSM running tee would be miserable in August. But when a brand refuses to publish weight and the photos show fabric you can nearly see through, that is a choice they made to hit a price.
Look for the elastane or spandex percentage on the composition label. Somewhere between five and twenty percent is normal for stretch sportswear, depending on what it is.
What matters more than the number is recovery, meaning whether the fabric snaps back or stays stretched. Cheap elastane blends go baggy at the knees and seat after a few wears and never come back. You cannot see this on a product page. You can feel it by pulling the fabric and watching how fast it returns.
Recycled polyester is now common and is generally fine. It is not a quality indicator in either direction.
Turn a garment inside out. This is the fastest quality check there is.
Flatlock seams lie flat against the skin and are what you want on anything worn next to skin during exercise. Overlocked seams have a raised ridge. They are cheaper and perfectly acceptable on a loose tee, and they will chafe on a compression short or a long ride.
Then count stitches. Loose, wide stitching is faster to sew and comes apart sooner. Look at the stress points specifically: the crotch gusset on shorts, the underarm, the pocket corners on a jersey. Reinforcement at those three points costs the manufacturer very little and is skipped constantly.
Bonded and taped seams are a step up again and are worth paying for on waterproofs, where an untaped seam simply lets water in regardless of how good the outer fabric is.
Zips fail more often than fabric does. YKK is the default reliable option and brands that use it tend to say so. An unbranded zip on a £100 jacket is a warning sign, not a saving.
Same goes for drawcords, cord locks and press studs. These parts cost pennies and are the first things to break, which makes them a decent proxy for how carefully the rest of the garment was specified.
Grading is how a brand scales a pattern across sizes. Done properly, a size XL fits an XL body the way the small fits a small body. Done cheaply, the pattern is scaled up uniformly, so sleeves get longer at the same rate the chest gets wider, and the largest and smallest sizes fit badly.
You can spot this in reviews rather than on the product page. If a brand's returns skew heavily to one or two sizes at the ends of the range, the grading is off. We have had exactly this problem ourselves on one line and had to take it back to the manufacturer, so this is not a theoretical complaint.
Wash it five times at the temperature on the label and look for three things. Has it shrunk. Has the colour gone flat. Do the seams still lie flat.
Then wear it for its actual purpose, not a gentle version of it. Sportswear that only works when you are barely sweating is not sportswear.
Most quality problems show up inside six weeks. If a brand's returns window is fourteen days, that is worth factoring in.
Affordable kit should get you correct fabric weight for the job, flatlock seams where they touch skin, reinforced stress points, decent hardware and honest sizing. All of that is achievable at a sensible price if a brand keeps its range short and sells direct.
Affordable kit will not usually get you the newest fabric technologies, deep size ranges, wide colour choice or seasonal drops. Those things cost money to hold in stock and someone has to pay for the ones that do not sell.
Our own range is priced between roughly £30 and £100 and it is short by design. Fewer products means larger orders per item, which means a better unit cost, which we can either take as margin or pass on. We would rather sell six things people keep than sixty things people replace.
