Two tees can sit in the same listing with wildly different crossed-out numbers behind them, and that is usually the point where most of us stop reading and start clicking. I’d rather do the arithmetic first. The spread on Crooksncastles runs from CA$99 at the floor to CA$300 at the ceiling, which sounds like a shop that can’t make up its mind until you notice the gap tracks what the garment actually is rather than how clever a buyer you’ve been.
The numbers, laid out flat
Eighty-five products across five sections, and the ladder sorts itself by category almost perfectly. Tees live at the bottom. A pullover hoodie sits a notch above them, sweatshirts sit above that, and a full tracksuit lands near the top for the obvious reason that you’re paying for two garments in one order. Here are the bands each section occupies right now.
| Section | Today’s price | Where it sits on the ladder |
| T-shirts and tees | CA$99 – CA$110 | The floor. A Sea Goddess Tee or a Greco Medusa Tee lands here |
| Shorts | CA$99 – CA$150 | Overlaps the tee band underneath and the hoodie band on top |
| Hoodies | CA$122 – CA$150 | One rung up, pullovers such as the Claw 02 Hoodie |
| Sweatpants | CA$145 | Flat, sitting close to the middle of the range |
| Sweatshirts | CA$160 – CA$179 | The dearest single garments, oversized and dolman cuts included |
| Tracksuits | CA$210 | Two pieces, so it reads high on the page without really being high |
The median across the shop is somewhere around CA$130, and that is the figure I keep in my head instead of the ceiling. Half the shop sits below it. CA$300 belongs to the list prices, which run from CA$160 up, and nothing on the site is being charged at that top figure today, so treating it as the real price of anything will give you a distorted picture of the whole catalogue before you’ve even opened a product page.
What a struck-through CA$300 tells you, and what it won’t
A crossed-out number is a reference point. It says where the shop has placed that garment’s list value, nothing more, and once a lower price has been sitting there a long while it quietly stops being a discount and simply becomes the price. So I read the small number as the cost and the big one as background noise.
The sweatshirt section is where this gets interesting, because a CA$300 list can land at CA$177 — a drop of roughly CA$123, which looks enormous beside a tee moving from CA$160 down to CA$99. Except the tee’s cut is about CA$61, and as a fraction of the list the two reductions sit within a few points of each other. The math is dull but useful. Markdowns here look set across the board rather than piece by piece, so the bigger crossed-out figure isn’t evidence that you’ve found a better bargain than the person buying the cheap tee.
Where CA$300 of budget goes furthest
Say you’ve set aside CA$300 and you want it to do the most work. The ladder stops being abstract pretty quickly. One sweatshirt at CA$179 plus a tee at CA$99 leaves you change and two pieces that work in different weather. Two hoodies at CA$122 each gives you a pair of pullovers for less than the sweatshirt-plus-tee route, which surprised me the first time I added it up. Or the CA$210 tracksuit on its own, the only line on this list that ends with a matching set rather than two separate decisions.
| Pro Tip: Stripping both crossed-out figures out of the picture changed how the whole shop reads to me. The prices you’d actually pay cluster tightly — CA$122, CA$130, CA$145, CA$150 — while the list figures fan out from CA$160 to CA$300. The upper numbers are doing nearly all of the work on your eye and almost none on your wallet. |
A few gaps the headline range hides
Reading down the bands, there are a couple of things the CA$99-to-CA$300 headline flattens completely, and they’re the bits I’d want to know first.
- Honestly, the walk from the cheapest tee to the dearest sweatshirt comes out at roughly CA$80, which is nothing like the chasm you’d picture after reading CA$99 and CA$300 in the same breath.
- A quarter zip such as the Gothic Fade can come in under the sweatshirt band while doing pretty much the same job (which, if you’re hunting for value rather than a bargain, is where I’d look first).
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the same hoodie show two prices?
The higher figure is the list value the shop has assigned to it, and the lower one is what you’d pay today. Both appear on the listing. Only the second one leaves your account, so that’s the figure I’d compare against anything else you’re considering.
Is CA$99 reasonable for a graphic tee?
That’s the bottom rung here, and it’s the floor right across the t-shirt section, from a plain Califas Tee to a raw edge piece. Reasonable depends on you, really — a tee that comes out of the drawer most weeks works out cheaper per wear than a CA$179 sweatshirt you keep for going out, so the cheap thing can quietly be the expensive mistake if you never wear it.
Does a larger discount mean better value?
Not on this site. The cuts that look deepest are sitting on the pieces that carried the highest list price in the first place, and once you’ve turned them into percentages the gap between a tee’s reduction and a sweatshirt’s more or less evaporates. What you’ll actually wear decides the value here, not how long the line through the old number is.
Will prices stay where they are?
I wouldn’t count on it. Everything in the shop is currently priced under a higher list figure, and that arrangement isn’t permanent by nature, so a CA$130 piece you’ve been thinking about for a month might not sit at CA$130 next month.
What about shipping on top of the price?
I won’t put a figure on that. The shipping and returns pages on the site don’t read as though they were written for a Canadian shop at all, and the amounts and timings there look borrowed from somewhere else entirely. Those details live on the shop’s own policy pages, and I’d read them properly before ordering rather than afterwards.
What I’d take away from the ladder
So the honest version of CA$99 to CA$300 is that the spread is narrower than it reads, and a median of roughly CA$130 describes this shop much better than either end of it ever will. I’d settle on the band my budget lives in, let the crossed-out figures go, and then ask myself how many times in a year that colourway and that cut would actually get me out of the door — which sorts a Crooks and Castles tee, a hoodie and a tracksuit into order far more honestly than the price tag on the page manages to.
