That Inconvenient Tag That Forces You To Do The Right Thing

For many people, November is the month of giving thanks. It marks the end of autumn, a season where families gather to feast and appreciate the accumulation of another year—its triumphs, its weariness, and the people who carried us through it. Like Germany’s Erntedankfest, autumn embodies a universal sentiment: gratitude for a bountiful harvest and the labour behind it. Yet November is also the month for another kind of harvest: the annual surge of 11/11 Singles Day sales, Black Friday blowouts, and Cyber Monday frenzies, where retailers anticipate massive demand and brace themselves for the behaviors these incentives inevitably shape.

This year, viral images from China showed online fashion retail attaching A4-sized, stiff, unmistakably visible hang tags to garments, emblazoned with the message “No returns or exchanges if removed”. Many clothing shops and e-commerce platforms offer some form of unconditional return policy, allowing shoppers to send back goods without defect or justification. H&M and Shein, for example, require that clothing be unworn, unwashed, and returned with original hang tags intact. And while the spirit behind such policies is customer-friendly, it has also enabled an unfortunate genre of opportunism: buying clothes for the sole purpose of wearing them once, often for an event, a livestream, or the perfect photo, before returning them for a full refund.

Oversized labels were used to unglamorously curb abusive order returns. Source

These generous return policies create a cascade of hidden costs for retailers. Every return triggers an entire second round of labour: reverse shipping, inspection, repackaging, quality checks, and often deeply discounted resale or disposal. “Like new” is a fiction that rarely survives makeup smudges, deodorant traces, wrinkles, or an evening out. High return volumes distort inventory forecasting, choke warehouse capacity, and inflate labour demands. A single wear may render an item unsellable, and the retailer absorbs the total loss.

Wearing an item once with the intent of sending it back afterwards, also known as “wardrobing”, is widely recognized as a form of return fraud.

Rather than relying on reminders or education campaigns about such behaviors, some retailers have moved up the Hierarchy of Intervention Effectiveness by introducing forcing functions. Traditional hang tags can be tucked away, allowing people to wear the garment comfortably and discreetly. These A4 labels, by contrast, are visually unmissable and physically awkward. They afford trying the garment on, but are so conspicuously intrusive that no sensible person would wear them outside without removing them, and in doing so voiding any returns.

These tags are more than just individual oversized reminders. True to its forcing function nature, the oversized tags restrict and annoy abusers attempting return fraud. Forcing functions are subtle but powerful pieces of design. They intentionally feature characteristics that shape behavior not by policing but through engineered constraints. They make the undesirable path awkward or unworkable, nudging people toward the intended behavior long before rules, reminders, or reprimands ever come into play.

We encounter forcing functions every day: microwave ovens that refuse to run unless the door is shut, USB connectors that fit only one way, cars that won’t shift out of park until the brake is pressed, and childproof medicine bottles engineered to resist curious hands. In healthcare, many hospitals have removed high-concentration potassium chloride (KCl) from ward stock entirely. While low doses of KCl are used to treat and prevent low potassium levels in the blood, too much KCl can cause cardiac arrests and other neuromuscular effects. The possibility of accidental overdose is thus eliminated by removing this affordance altogether. These interventions are not exotic. They are everyday examples of simple, intentional design that prevents harm without requiring sophisticated technology.

So the next time you feel motivated to improve a safety intervention (good on you!), start by examining whether you can remove the very affordances that enable unsafe or unwanted behavior. Successful forcing functions avoid leaning on training, posters, or reminders to boost vigilance or compliance. Instead, they make tangible changes that eliminate risky shortcuts while keeping the safe route effortless.

But even the cleverest safeguards face one unavoidable truth: humans are endlessly inventive. Every barrier invites a workaround. As the Chinese saying goes, “道高一尺，魔高一丈”—raise the barrier by one foot, and (evil) ingenuity grows by ten. Forcing functions help us guide behavior, but human creativity will always meet us on the other side.

Is this seriously a fashion trend? Source.