Twenty-one dollars. That’s the gap between a hoodie on its own and a full tracksuit at the cheaper end of the range, and it was small enough that it stopped me scrolling. The tracksuit category runs C$120 to C$145 for a set of two garments while the hoodies hold a flat C$99 each, so the arithmetic you’d expect from a bundle doesn’t quite behave the way bundles usually do. I went back through the Essentials Hoodie listings twice because the numbers looked wrong to me, and they weren’t.
Twenty-one dollars, and what it covers
A set at C$120 gives you a fleece hoodie and a matching bottom. A hoodie on its own comes to C$99. That’s the whole gap. Which means the second garment in that set costs you about what a sandwich and a coffee run to in downtown Toronto, and that kind of math earns a bundle a second look rather than an instant no.
The top of the tracksuit range tells a slightly different story, mind you. At C$145 you’re forty-six dollars past the hoodie-only number, still well under what a separate pair of bottoms would normally cost anywhere, but no longer loose change either. Where any particular set lands inside that C$120 to C$145 band varies across the twenty-seven of them, and the listing page is the only place that’ll tell you which is which.
The bottoms aren’t sold on their own
This is the part that quietly settles the argument for a lot of people. Running down the category list on essentialhoodiecanada.com — Hoodies, 1977 Essentials Hoodie, Tracksuit, T-Shirts, Shorts, Short Set, Sweater, Beanie — I couldn’t find a sweatpants section anywhere. Full-length bottoms seem to arrive through a tracksuit, or through the shorts and short-set pages if you’re shopping for the warmer half of the year.
So the comparison most people have in their head, a C$120 set weighed against a C$99 hoodie plus matching bottoms picked up separately, isn’t really on the table here. You’d be pairing that hoodie with bottoms from somewhere else entirely, which drags in a problem of its own. (More on the colour side of that in a second.)
| What you’re buying | Price at essentialhoodiecanada.com |
| Hoodie on its own | C$99 |
| 1977 hoodie on its own | C$99 |
| Tracksuit, two pieces | C$120–145 |
| Boxy tee | C$80 |
| The shop grid end to end | about C$74–145 |
Grey next to grey
Colour is where a set earns most of its keep, honestly. Grey is rarely one colour. Anyone who has tried to put a heather grey hoodie together with heather grey bottoms from a different purchase knows how often one half reads warmer, or half a shade darker, or faintly greener under a Calgary kitchen light in February — and the two of them side by side look like a near miss instead of a pair.
A set takes that whole headache off the table, because both halves come from the same colourway on the same product page. Bone sits with bone. And with Fear of God’s Essentials line specifically, where so much of the look rests on muted tones doing the work rather than graphics, a near-miss grey shows up far more than it would on something louder with a print across the front.
When buying them apart still makes more sense
Plenty of times, honestly.
If the bottoms already in your drawer are perfectly fine, paying for a second pair just to get a matching top is money heading sideways. Same thing if the hoodie is the only half you’ll genuinely wear — plenty of people never once put the matching bottoms on, and the set has quietly become an expensive hoodie with a spare folded underneath it.
- You already wear bottoms you like and you’re only short a top.
- You want the hoodie in bone and the bottoms in black, which no set will hand you.
- One size has to cover both halves of a set, and the oversized cut doesn’t always sit the same way above and below the waist.
- The set you’ve got your eye on has drifted up towards C$145 while the hoodie hasn’t budged off C$99.
That last one matters more than it sounds. The flat hoodie price is the fixed point in all of this, so every comparison you make is really a question about where the set you want sits inside its own range.
The same sum at the other shop
Prices don’t travel between shops, which is worth holding onto before you commit to a number. Over at Essentials Hoodies the hoodies run somewhere around C$111 to C$120 and the 1977 pieces climb higher again, roughly C$117 to C$170, so a single hoodie there can cost you about what a complete two-piece costs on the other site. That doesn’t make either shop wrong. It does mean the set-versus-separates sum has to be redone on whichever page you’re actually standing on, because the gap that makes a tracksuit obvious at C$120 next to C$99 can narrow or flip entirely somewhere else.
Key Takeaways
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is a tracksuit always cheaper than buying the two pieces?
At the bottom of the range it’s hard to argue otherwise, since C$120 for two garments against C$99 for one does the arguing for you. Up towards C$145 the case softens a fair bit, and if the bottoms are never coming out of the drawer it disappears completely.
Can I buy just the tracksuit bottoms?
Not from a category of their own, going by the sections essentialhoodiecanada.com lists. Shorts and short sets cover the warmer months, but a full-length bottom looks like it comes as half of a set rather than on its own line.
Do both halves of a set really match?
They sit under one colourway on one product page, which is the whole point of buying them together, so they ought to read as a pair. I’d still look properly at the product photos, since a screen can shift a tone, and the shop’s 14-day window on unworn items with tags on leaves an exchange open as a backstop if something turns up looking off.
So it comes down to something simpler than the arithmetic in the end: how many of the two pieces will you actually wear. If the answer is both, a set at C$120 is doing you a favour and the colour match arrives free. If it’s one, C$99 buys exactly the half you want and nothing you don’t. Worth sitting with the tracksuit listings for a minute or two before the hoodie grid pulls you straight through to checkout.
