Finding extremely specific clothing items at retail

[Copper Bezel]

So, weird problem, and I'm wondering if any of you all have any experience with it. I'm approaching this as a Google search problem, but I'm not sure if that's even the right approach (at which point this becomes the wrong forum to even be asking it, and it's already a stretch.)

Say I have a pair of shoes, or a particular shirt, and I don't have any information from the original packaging. I have the brand, I have the physical object and all the categorizing characteristics that implies, but I don't have anything like a model number or name to go on. Say I want to find a second copy of this exact pair of shoes or whatnot. I know that they probably still exist at retail somewhere in the world, but searching by the brand and characteristics on a Google Image search just turns back a lot of things that are similar but not the same brand, or the same brand but not similar, and so on. No amount of jimmying with quotation-marked phrases helps.

What do you do when this comes up?

[ivnja]

This is more of a practical answer than the potentially more interesting Google search answer, but if you have the brand, why not go directly to that brand's website and search or browse from there?

[Copper Bezel]

Believe me, I'll take the simpler option if it exists. = ) I may be getting the mark wrong (the shoes belong to a friend) but I believe it was Splash Fashion Footwear. Searching that on Google turns up nothing but further search returns from shady shopping search websites. Something called "Splash Fashions" has a website, but it's not the same company. = / (They're a retailer, not a manufacturer, and not in the US.)

[troyp]

If I'm try to do something like this, I usually just do the best search I can on google images and scroll through the pages of thumbnails (using an autopaging addon makes it less annoying). If your internet connection is reasonable, it's not hard to scroll through hundreds or even thousands of images, so it gives you a fair chance of finding something.

Apart from that, just general google advice: if you can think of any specific identifying trait at all, try it; if you can identify a particular class of items giving false hits, try to find a search term to exclude them (eg. -cowboy, -sandal, whatever), etc...

[Copper Bezel]

Yeah, that was my first thought, and I did try an image search with some very specific search terms. I agree that with a decent connection speed, it's not very troublesome and usually works. I'm not finding the item, though (or anything comparable, for that matter.) Damn, now I just really wish that clothing items had model numbers.

[Copper Bezel]

Update, for anyone curious - I never did find the shoes I was looking for, but the friend whose shoes they were and I spent a couple of hours with Google Images and eBay and found some reasonable alternatives. eBay was especially fun - after narrowing down the search in every possible way and then just browsing the results, it was amusing to realize afterward that we'd actually paged through about 2500 items to find 3-4 candidates. = )

[freakish777]

A lot of times someone who wants to be a fashion designer will put together 20~100 shirts/pants/shoes/whatever and take them to local stores to try and see if the local store is willing to sell it. If people like it, and it sells out, the fashion designer will try to convince the retailer to put in an order for X more, and in the meantime they make X + 100 more, and take the other 100 to some other store as well.

So even if you have the brand, there may only be like 200 of that particular pair of shoes.

I've run into this problem before, I have a pair of white pants, that feel like their made out a plasticy, garbage bag-like material, I got them on eBay several years ago.

They got stained, and I went to try and find another pair. The brand was BIO Designs. Or maybe it was 310 Designs? Or something (it's not that I don't remember, it's that the font they used was ambiguous)??? Long story short, it took me 4~6 years or so of eBay/Google searches (once every couple months) to find another pair. eBay tends to be better because someone is always selling something and it changes more frequently. Google tends to be worse for anything like this (brand "out of business") because they don't show up on regular retail sites (if the brand is out of business, why would a retailer want something that didn't sell well the first time?).

[Copper Bezel]

Wow, I didn't realize - I assumed that anything bought at regular big-box retail was probably coming from a regular, non-local, established distributor.

Damn. And how could this not sell? = )