A Better Way to Compare BJJ Gis

Want an awesome way to look at the 2011 BJJ Survey Results? Check this out:

Overall Rating vs Average Price

The Top 20 list (or Top 33 as it were) doesn’t really give you a meaningful way to compare brands, partly because most brands are pretty good, and partly because of the margin for error. (You can read all about that here.)

With this graph, you can roughly break the BJJ gi market down into four big groups:

Across the top you have those with good reputations, and across the bottom, the bad. The left side is cheaper, the right is more expensive. And “average” brands and prices are across the middle. (The overall average price for a gi is $144.27.)

Yes, I know what you’re thinking.

“How can My Favorite Gi™ be rated so badly?”

“Crappy Brand X is higher than awesome Brand Y? Preposterous!”

“Can Small Brand A really be better than Big Brand B?”

Whoa whoa, slow down. I’m sorry if this graph doesn’t jive with your opinions. You may find these rankings controversial or even disrespectful. But remember that these aren’t my opinions—they’re what the survey data showed. You can argue with the 1,800 or so reviewers.

Still, why did some brands with usually good reputations end up lower? We may have logical explanations.

Don’t forget there’s a margin for error. Think of these as fuzzy points. An average brand has the potential to be good (and bad.) Factors outside our control can affect ranking too (which we talked about here.)

Remember that we are lumping together all reviews for a brand. It’s possible they had a divide between good and bad reviews that shifted their rating out of where you’d expect it.

For example, when we look deeper into individual brands, we may find situations like this:

Here we see a brand with two models of BJJ gis at different prices. One is great, the other not so much. This would earn them an “average to good” overall ranking, though some people are having fantastic experiences while other are having bad ones.

We can imagine another company with quality control problems between batches, resulting in a split between happy and unhappy customers.

Like Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception, we won’t know until we go one layer deeper.

To find out, stay tuned over the next few weeks as we profile each company in survey (and a few that didn’t make it in.)