Apparel brand: $137K/year recovered from refund spike on 3 SKUs
A $3M Shopify apparel brand saw refund rate climb from 5.0% to 8.4% in 8 weeks. 
Halia surfaced 3 SKUs in size M driving 47% of refunds; the brand re-tagged in 14 days and recovered $11,400/month.
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Refund rate jumped 68% in 8 weeks. 3 SKUs drove half of it.
The brand’s overall refund rate looked manageable. But concentration on 3 specific SKUs in size M was bleeding $11,400/month in margin and processing cost.
How this brand found their $137,000.
$3M apparel DTC brand on Shopify.
Operating with two warehouse partners. Refund rate had been a steady 4–5% for two years — no one flagged it.
Halia joined Shopify, Gorgias, and returns data.
Surfaced refund rate had crept from 5.0% to 8.4% over 8 weeks — but 47% of the spike came from only 3 SKUs in size M.
The team checked the listings.
All 3 SKUs shared a tag from a new fabric supplier; size-M chest measurements were ~5cm tighter than the prior batch. Tickets in Gorgias confirmed fit complaints.
Re-photographed, re-tagged.
Updated size guides and refreshed photos on the 3 SKUs. Refund rate dropped back to 5.6% in 14 days. $11,400/month recovered; Halia now watches for repeat drift across the catalog.
From data connection to $11,400/month confirmed in 30 days.
Halia surfaced the SKU concentration within a week of being connected; the drift detector keeps watching after the fix.
Halia joined refund metadata with SKU attributes and caught the concentration the second the rate breached the historical band.— From the operator engagement notesFind this exact leak on your store in 5 minutes.
Connect your stack — Halia surfaces where your margin is leaking before the monthly P&L close.
You probably have a version of this leak.
If any of these signals match your apparel operation, the same pattern is likely already costing you margin.
Refund rate creeping up
Your monthly refund rate is trending higher, but no single product looks obviously responsible.
Hot-selling SKUs
A small set of SKUs drives most of your revenue — and most of your refunds if anything goes wrong with one of them.
Supplier rotation
You source from multiple mills or factories and rotate without tight QA on size/spec consistency.
CS sees it first
Customer service hears fit complaints in week one; the data team sees them weeks later in a monthly rollup.
Questions operators ask about refund-rate drift.
Why doesn’t our refund report catch this?
The monthly refund rate aggregates across every SKU, so a 3-SKU concentration gets diluted by the rest of the catalog. The signal lives in the per-SKU and per-size cohort — not the topline.
How does Halia know which baseline to compare against?
Halia builds a rolling 12-week baseline for refund rate per SKU and per size variant. When a current week breaches the upper band, it alerts before the topline rate has moved meaningfully.
Is an 8.4% refund rate really that bad for apparel?
For DTC apparel: 5–6% is healthy, 7%+ is a yellow flag, 8%+ sustained is hurting margin — and is usually concentrated in a small subset of SKUs you can fix once you can see them.
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