Cut and Sew Apparel Manufacturing (U.S.) — Industry-Group Primer

NAICS 2022 code 3152. NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the standard code set U.S. statistical agencies use to define industries. This page covers the four-digit industry group 3152 — the whole business of cutting and sewing cloth into finished clothing in the United States. It sits inside the broader Apparel Manufacturing subsector (NAICS 315) and, unlike its cut-and-sew scope, deliberately excludes knitting mills (315120) and apparel accessories (315990).[17]

Because this is a rollup, its real value is the contrast between its two children — who owns them, how they earn, and how (or whether) you can invest — so Section 2 leads with a side-by-side comparison before we cover the group as a whole.

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1. Overview

Cut and sew apparel is the part of the clothing chain where flat fabric becomes wearable garments. NAICS splits that work into two economically opposite businesses, and 3152 contains exactly those two:

• The contractor (31521) — a sewing job shop that stitches fabric it does not own, for a fee. The trade calls this CMT — cut, make, trim.[15]
• The manufacturer/jobber (31525) — a firm that owns the goods: it buys the fabric, owns the finished garment, and markets it (a "jobber" owns the product but hires the sewing out).

One fact frames everything below: the U.S. clothing market is roughly $362–366 billion at retail, but only about 2.5% of the clothing bought in America is actually made in America (~97.5% imported).[3] The country imported $79.3 billion of apparel in 2023 — China alone supplied $16.9 billion (~21%), China and Vietnam together just under 40%, and Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia and Pakistan a further $21.4 billion (27%).[4] So this whole group — about $7.5 billion of domestic receipts[1] — is the surviving domestic sewing base, not "the apparel industry" a stock investor pictures. The famous apparel tickers are mostly brand marketers whose garments are sewn offshore, largely outside this domestic footprint. The practical investor takeaway: there is no sizable, publicly traded U.S. pure-play cut-and-sew manufacturer; the group matters as a private-market niche and as a barometer of reshoring and trade policy.

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2. What's inside — the two children and how they differ

This is the heart of the rollup. The group is not a single homogeneous industry: it is a small fee-for-labor job-shop business bolted to a larger own-the-goods manufacturing-and-brand business. They differ on almost every axis that matters to an investor.

(HHI = Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, a 0–10,000 concentration score where higher is more concentrated; antitrust regulators treat anything under 1,500 as "unconcentrated." CR4 / CR50 = combined revenue share of the four / fifty largest firms.)[1][2][20][22] The defense row is Defense Logistics Agency obligations coded to each NAICS in fiscal 2024 — contract dollars awarded, not company receipts, and a different year from the census figures above, so read it as a channel comparison rather than a share of revenue.[7]

The one-line read: 31525 is the bigger, own-the-goods, brand-adjacent half where the revenue and the public tickers live; 31521 is the smaller, poorer, purer-labor half where the headcount, firm count and — importantly — the defense dollars concentrate, but where there is nothing public to buy. Both are atomized; both are secularly shrinking; both benefit only at the margin from tariffs, reshoring, and "Made in USA" demand.

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3. Size — the group's rollup figures

Federal ground-truth figures for NAICS 3152 (the two children combined):

What the numbers say:

• Micro-scale and atomized. Average revenue is ~$2.0 million per firm and pay is ~$41,700 per worker — well below the U.S. manufacturing average, reflecting a base of tiny, labor-intensive shops. On the contractor side the average firm carries only about $0.3 million of assets, and the U.S. Small Business Administration's cutoff for "small" in this kind of manufacturing is 750 employees — a threshold essentially no firm in this group approaches.[1][2][20]
• Even more fragmented than either child. The group HHI of 48.8 is lower than 31521's (80.1) or 31525's (84.3), and the group CR4 (9.6%) is below either child's (~13%). That is not a typo: pooling two already-fragmented industries measures each large firm's share against a bigger combined base, so the biggest cut-and-sew firms look even smaller here. It takes the top 50 firms combined just to reach 41% of the group — no one has pricing power.[1] (The children's firm counts, 2,106 and 1,678, total slightly more than the group's 3,770, because a firm active in both industries is counted once at the group level.)
• Concentrated in place even while atomized in ownership. California holds roughly 1,332 contractor establishments and 10,800 contractor employees — about 64% of the nation's contractor plants and 48% of its contractor employment — with New York, Dallas and Miami behind it.[18] The Los Angeles garment cluster is put at ~45,000 workers, though that is a trade-wide estimate spanning more than these two codes.[26] That the cluster estimate sits close to the group's entire employer-counted national headcount of 47,582 is itself a useful signal about the counting problem below.

Undercount caveat — important here. County Business Patterns counts only employer establishments (at least one paid employee). Cut-and-sew, especially the contractor half, is exactly where that misses the most: home-based sewers, one-person contractors, and informal or unregistered shops — the shadow segment behind the Los Angeles wage-theft cases. Private research firm IBISWorld's broader business count runs into the thousands more once non-employers are added.[12] And these figures count only clothing physically produced in the U.S. — they are not the size of the American clothing business, which is ~$362–366 billion at retail and ~97.5% imported.[3] Read $7.5 billion as a floor on the surviving domestic base, not a census of the market.

The erosion is measurable on three separate clocks. Contractor establishments fell about 28% between 2017 and 2023 (2,921 → 2,094).[19][2] U.S. apparel manufacturing output fell about 17% in 2025 by one industry index.[5] And the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment across the broader apparel-manufacturing subsector — NAICS 315, wider than this group — to fall from 84,500 in 2024 to 58,800 in 2034, a 30.4% decline.[6]

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4. Investable universe — where value concentrates across the children

The value and the tradable exposure are not evenly split between the children; they sit almost entirely on the 31525 (own-the-goods) side, and even there they are brand businesses, not factories. The one exception runs the other way: defense sewing dollars flow mainly through 31521 (Section 7) — and nothing there is public either.

• Public equity lives in 31525's "jobbers," and their own filings show how offshore they are. VF Corporation sources from ~273 facilities in ~30 countries; Kontoor Brands makes ~30% internally and buys ~70% from ~210 contract factories across 19 countries; Levi Strauss sources nearly all product through independent contract manufacturers in roughly 32 countries; G-III Apparel took ~76% of its fiscal-2025 product from Vietnam, China and Indonesia.[22][23][26] Judge the set — VF (ticker VFC), PVH Corp. (PVH), Ralph Lauren (RL), Levi Strauss (LEVI), Gildan Activewear (GIL), Columbia Sportswear (COLM), Kontoor Brands (KTB), Carter's (CRI), Oxford Industries (OXM), Guess? (GES), G-III Apparel (GIII) — as branded consumer-discretionary equities, not domestic-factory exposure. Verifiably U.S.-produced public exposure is very thin, e.g. micro-cap Digital Brands Group (DBGI) with Los Angeles production.
• One name to correct: HanesBrands is no longer a standalone ticker — Gildan closed the acquisition on December 1, 2025.[14] The 31521 primer's list of indirect public proxies still carries HBI separately; treat that exposure as sitting inside GIL now.
• Uniform and workwear services are the closest public thing to domestic sewing — and still not the thing itself. Cintas (CTAS) runs five manufacturing facilities for standard uniform requirements, and UniFirst (UNF) manufactured about 62% of the garments it placed in service in fiscal 2025; Superior Group of Companies (SGC) and Lakeland Industries (LAKE) sit nearby.[26] But their economics are recurring rental and service revenue, not merchant apparel manufacturing — proxies, not pure plays.
• 31521 has no public pure-play at all. No sizable U.S.-listed company's main business is domestic contract sewing; the last domestic-heavy listing, Delta Apparel, filed Chapter 11 in 2024, was delisted, and sold its Salt Life brand for ~$38.7 million.[13] The one identifiable public ownership link into the sewing base is Fechheimer — public-safety, postal and military uniforms — owned by Berkshire Hathaway and immaterial to the parent.[24]
• The genuinely domestic-manufacturing exposure — in either child — is private and small: contract sewing shops, the Los Angeles garment cluster, "Made in USA" direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands (e.g., American Giant, Los Angeles Apparel), and Berry-compliant defense/uniform suppliers such as ReadyOne Industries, Mills Manufacturing and Propper.[26] Reaching it means private equity, direct ownership, or a supplier relationship — not a ticker.

Bottom line: public routes are almost all brand plays (offshore-made); real domestic-factory exposure is private. The two child primers carry the full company-by-company tables.

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5. How the money works

The two children earn money in opposite ways — the single most useful thing to understand about this group.

• The contractor (31521) sells labor and machine time. Priced per garment under CMT: the brand owns the fabric, and the shop bills sewing labor, factory overhead, and a thin margin. The math is cost-per-minute × minutes-per-garment, where minutes come from a garment's SMV (standard minute value — the industry's estimate of the sewing time a garment needs). Contractors typically add only a ~10–15% margin on the labor portion, so profit lives or dies on capacity utilization, labor efficiency, and mix shift toward higher-value garments.[15] The reason that margin cannot widen is buyer power: brands maintain no long-term manufacturing commitments and their supply base is globally contestable — a domestic shop is not competing with the shop down the street but with 32 countries' worth of alternatives.[22][23] It behaves like a low-margin, high-cyclicality machine job shop — no franchising, no recurring revenue.
• The manufacturer/jobber (31525) sells the garment itself. Revenue is the wholesale price; the core cost is again CMT (factory labor plus overhead per unit). Because U.S. sewing wages are a large multiple of Asian wages, domestic makers can't win on price — they earn on speed/replenishment, small-batch runs too short to import economically, a "Made in USA" premium, and compliant contracts that must be domestic, all while carrying direct exposure to cotton and oil-linked synthetic prices.[21] The branded jobber earns differently again: value sits in brand, design, and intellectual property (IP); sewing is outsourced offshore. Healthy branded-apparel economics run roughly 60–70% gross margin at retail and ~40–50% at wholesale — a distinction worth holding, since a mostly-wholesale name like Kontoor Brands posted a 44.5% gross margin and 13.1% operating margin in 2024.[26] The levers are pricing power, DTC mix, inventory/markdown discipline, and sourcing cost.

So within one four-digit group you have a ~10–15%-margin labor job shop, a thin-margin domestic factory, and a brand business at 40–70% gross margin depending on channel — three different economic animals, which is why "cut and sew apparel" as a single number tells you very little.

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6. Demand drivers

• Where brands choose to make clothes. The offshore-versus-domestic sourcing decision has pulled most volume abroad for decades; with ~97.5% of clothing imported and $79.3 billion landed in 2023, demand for domestic output specifically is a niche created by speed, small runs, and "Made in USA" preference, not by overall clothing demand.[3][4]
• Consumer discretionary spending and fashion cycles. Clothing is cyclical and deferrable; sales track income, employment, and confidence, and inventories whipsaw with trend, weather, and holiday/back-to-school peaks.
• Trade policy and tariffs — the dominant near-term swing factor. Average U.S. apparel-import tariffs rose from ~14.7% in January 2025 to ~35.1% by December 2025, the highest in decades — a potential tailwind for domestic makers and a headwind for import-reliant brands.[5] The 2025 suspension of the duty-free de minimis exemption for sub-$800 parcels, with a full repeal pending in 2027, tightens the import backdrop further.[11]
• Institutional / mandated demand. Federal purchasing — military uniforms and government workwear — is a durable, domestic-only demand floor, and it lands disproportionately on the contractor child (Section 7).[7]
• Reshoring / nearshoring momentum, best understood as a portfolio tool rather than a wholesale shift: brands keep Asian factories for predictable high-volume programs while reserving domestic capacity for test runs and fast replenishment.[25] Steadier uniform and workwear contracts form the other domestic growth pocket.

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7. Regulation

Apparel is lightly capital-regulated but carries meaningful labeling, safety, labor, and trade rules — the same for both children, though they bite in different places:

• FTC labeling (Federal Trade Commission). The Textile Fiber Products Identification Act requires fiber content, manufacturer/marketer identity, and country of origin; the Care Labeling Rule requires cleaning instructions.[16]
• Product safety (CPSC — Consumer Product Safety Commission). The Flammable Fabrics Act sets flammability standards, with stricter children's-sleepwear rules; children's apparel also triggers CPSIA (Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act) testing.[16]
• Forced-labor / import rules (UFLPA — Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act). Presumes goods tied to the Xinjiang region are barred from U.S. entry, with no de-minimis exception to the ban itself; apparel and cotton are high-priority enforcement sectors, raising import-compliance cost and modestly favoring verifiable domestic supply.[16]
• Domestic-sourcing mandates (Berry Amendment, 10 U.S.C. §4862). Most U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) clothing must be entirely U.S.-sourced and U.S.-made; DoD buys on the order of ~$2 billion of military textiles, clothing and footwear a year across all categories.[8] The rollup detail matters: within that, Defense Logistics Agency obligations in fiscal 2024 were $624.3 million under the contractor code (315210) against $101.0 million under the manufacturer code (315250) — roughly six times more defense sewing work routed through the child with no public exposure.[7] "Berry-compliant" capability is a genuine moat, and it is mostly a contractor's moat.
• Labor law (state). California's Garment Worker Protection Act (SB 62, effective 2022) made California the first state to ban piece-rate pay for garment work, require an hourly minimum wage, and make brands jointly liable for wage theft in their contractors' shops — with a $200-per-employee, per-pay-period penalty for piece-rate violations.[9] Enforcement is not theoretical: a Department of Labor survey of 50 Southern California garment contractors in 2022 found violations in 80% of cases and recovered more than $892,000 for 296 workers.[10] Given that ~64% of the group's contractor plants sit in California,[18] this is the binding cost floor for the domestic sewing base, not a regional footnote.

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8. Consolidation

The two children point in opposite directions, and the group total masks it:

• At the making stage (both children), competition is brutal and fragmenting. The binding constraint is a labor-cost gap scale cannot close, which is why both children are among the most fragmented manufacturing industries you will find (CR4 ~13% and HHI ~80–84 in each) and why the pooled group is even more atomized (CR4 9.6%, HHI 48.8).[1] The only visible difference between them is head-weight: it takes the top 50 firms 46% of receipts in 31521 versus 52.1% in 31525 — the own-the-goods side has marginally more mass at the top, and that is the whole gap.[1] Consolidation here happens by exit, not acquisition: contractor establishments fell 28% in six years.[19][2] Survivors specialize — defense/uniform, technical/protective wear, fast-turn replenishment, premium "Made in USA" — rather than chase commodity volume.
• At the brand stage (the 31525 jobbers), consolidation is the story. Value has migrated from factories to brands, and the branded owners keep buying scale: Gildan completed its acquisition of HanesBrands on December 1, 2025, roughly doubling its size and targeting ~$200 million in cost synergies.[14] Meanwhile weaker mixed operators fail — Delta Apparel filed Chapter 11 in mid-2024, was delisted, and sold Salt Life for ~$38.7 million.[13]
• What roll-up activity exists on the pure-manufacturing side is concentrated in uniforms and workwear private equity, not the fashion-facing sewing base.

Expect continued bifurcation: bigger, sourcing-efficient brand platforms on top; a thinning tail of small domestic manufacturers and contractors below.

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9. Risks

• Structural import competition is existential. ~97.5% import penetration, $79.3 billion of imports in 2023, and a persistent labor-cost disadvantage keep shrinking the domestic base; BLS projects a further 30.4% employment decline across the broader apparel-manufacturing subsector through 2034.[3][4][5][6]
• Thin, fragile margins. A small move in wages, rent, input costs, or utilization can flip a contractor or domestic factory to a loss.
• Buyer power and customer concentration. Brands hold no long-term manufacturing contracts and source across dozens of countries, so a single lost program can take a shop's utilization with it.[22][23]
• Tariff / trade-policy whiplash — now the dominant variable, cutting both ways (tailwind for domestic makers, direct margin hit for import-reliant brands); policy can change fast.[5]
• Input-cost volatility — cotton, oil-linked synthetics, and freight move factory costs directly; USDA's July 2026 outlook projects world cotton production of 117.3 million bales against mill use of 122.0 million, with ending stocks down 6% — a tightening fiber market.[21]
• Labor and legal exposure — skilled-sewer scarcity, rising wages, UFLPA detentions, CPSIA/flammability liability, and SB-62-style wage-liability laws that now reach up to brands, against an 80% violation rate in recent DOL garment inspections.[9][10][16]
• Small-firm fragility — most firms are tiny and thinly capitalized (~$0.3 million of average assets on the contractor side), vulnerable to demand shocks, credit tightening, and key-customer loss.[1][20]
• Reshoring may simply disappoint — the mill, supplier and labor infrastructure takes years to rebuild, so tariff-driven intent does not convert quickly into domestic orders.[25]
• Fashion / brand risk (the public jobbers) — a jobber's value is its label, and labels are perishable.
• Illiquidity — the genuine domestic-manufacturing exposure is private and hard to exit.

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10. How to invest & outlook

Public routes are plentiful but almost entirely brand plays on the 31525 side — judge the Section 4 equities as consumer-discretionary brand businesses (brand strength, gross margin, inventory discipline, DTC mix, tariff exposure), not domestic-factory bets, because their goods are mostly sewn offshore. The uniform-service names (CTAS, UNF) get closer to real domestic garment production than any apparel brand does, but they are recurring rental-and-service businesses, so they price like services, not manufacturing. Tariff-resilient, verifiably U.S.-produced public exposure is very thin (e.g., micro-cap Digital Brands Group); broad apparel or consumer-discretionary funds are the diversified alternative.

Private routes are where real domestic-manufacturing exposure lives — in either child: backing or building contract sewing shops (31521) or domestic manufacturers/"Made in USA" brands (31525), ideally in a defensible niche — Berry-compliant defense/uniform, quick-turn DTC, or tailored/technical garments — plus uniform/workwear PE roll-ups. Note where the mandated money actually lands: the $624.3 million of FY2024 DLA obligations under the contractor code[7] says the compliance moat is strongest on the half of this group that has no listed comparable at all. The thesis rests on speed-to-market, small-batch flexibility, compliance moats, and any durable tariff-driven reshoring premium — not on out-competing imports on price.

Outlook. Tariffs are the swing factor, but 2025 evidence is that sourcing shifts between low-cost countries far more readily than it returns home;[5] forced-labor enforcement modestly favors domestic supply; consolidation continues at the brand tier while the making tier consolidates by attrition. With output down ~17% in 2025[5] and BLS projecting a 30% subsector employment decline by 2034,[6] the net judgment is unchanged and, if anything, better evidenced: the domestic cut-and-sew base is likely to stay small and specialized — defended by policy and niche demand rather than restored to 20th-century scale. For most investors, NAICS 3152 is best understood as a barometer of reshoring and trade policy and as a private acquisition or founder opportunity, with the tradable, liquid action sitting on the branded, import-sourced side.

→ For the full detail behind this rollup, read the two child primers: NAICS 31521 — Cut and Sew Apparel Contractors and NAICS 31525 — Cut and Sew Apparel Manufacturing (except Contractors).

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 Economic Census — Concentration Ratios and Selected Statistics, NAICS 3152 and children (receipts, firms, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI)." 2022. Our ground-truth federal stats for this level. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
2. U.S. Census Bureau. "County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 3152/315210/315250 (establishments, employment, payroll)." 2023. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
3. AllAmerican.org. "State of American Clothing Manufacturing Report." 2024–2025 — ~2.5% domestic / ~97.5% imported. https://allamerican.org/research/clothing-manufacturing-report/
4. U.S. International Trade Commission. "U.S. Imports for Consumption of Textiles and Apparel" (2023: $79.3B total; China $16.9B; Bangladesh/Cambodia/India/Indonesia/Pakistan $21.4B). https://www.usitc.gov/sites/default/files/publications/332/pub5543_0.pdf
5. WWD / Sourcing Journal. "US Apparel Manufacturing Fell 17% in 2025" (Kearney Reshoring Index; apparel-import tariffs 14.7%→35.1%). 2026. https://wwd.com/sourcing-journal/trade/kearney-reshoring-index-usa-domestic-apparel-manufacturing-1238945612/
6. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Industries with the fastest projected employment declines, 2024–2034" (NAICS 315: 84,500 → 58,800, −30.4%). https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/industries-fast-decline-employment.htm
7. Defense Logistics Agency. "Clothing and Textiles Small Business Report, FY2024" (NAICS 315210 obligations $624.3M; NAICS 315250 obligations $101.0M). https://www.dla.mil/Portals/104/Documents/SmallBusiness/DB%20Flyers/2025%20Flyers/CandT%20SB%20-%20V-11-14-2025.pdf
8. Congressional Research Service, "Domestic Preference Statutes: The Berry Amendment" (IF13001); U.S. International Trade Administration (~$2B annual DoD textile/clothing/footwear procurement; 10 U.S.C. §4862). https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF13001
9. Remake / Fashion Revolution; Epstein Becker Green (Wage & Hour Blog). "The Garment Worker Protection Act (SB 62)" — piece-rate ban, joint brand liability, $200 per-employee per-pay-period penalty. 2021–2022. https://remake.world/stories/faq-the-garment-worker-protection-act-sb62/
10. U.S. Department of Labor. "DOL Recovers More Than $892,000 for 296 Garment Workers in Southern California" (50-contractor survey, 80% violation rate). 2024. https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20240103-1
11. Forbes / CNN Business. "Trump Suspends De Minimis Tariff Exemption for Goods Under $800 (Temu, Shein)." 2025. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2025/07/30/trump-suspends-de-minimis-tariff-exemption-for-goods-under-800/
12. IBISWorld. "Cut & Sew Apparel Contractors in the US — Industry Analysis" (non-employer undercount). 2026. https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/cut-sew-apparel-contractors/339/
13. ASI / PPAI. "Delta Apparel Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy; Plans to Sell Salt Life Brand" (~$38.74M to Iconix). 2024. https://www.ppai.org/media-hub/delta-apparel-files-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy-plans-to-sell-salt-life-brand/
14. GlobeNewswire / Gildan Activewear. "Gildan Completes the Acquisition of HanesBrands" (closed December 1, 2025; ~$200M synergy target). 2025. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/12/01/3197119/0/en/Gildan-Completes-the-Acquisition-of-HanesBrands.html
15. Cosmo Sourcing, "CMT Explained: Cut, Make, and Trim"; Jinfeng Apparel, "How to Cost a Garment for CMT." 2024. https://www.cosmosourcing.com/blog/what-does-cut-make-and-trim-cmt-mean
16. U.S. Federal Trade Commission (Textile/Care Labeling Rules); U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (Flammable Fabrics Act, CPSIA); CSIS, "Assessing the Impact of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act After Three Years" (2025) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection UFLPA guidance. https://www.csis.org/analysis/assessing-impact-uyghur-forced-labor-prevention-act-after-three-years
17. U.S. Census Bureau / NAICS Association. "NAICS 2022 — Industry Group 3152, Cut and Sew Apparel Manufacturing (definition and structure)." 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/
18. California Employment Development Department. "QCEW Industry Data, NAICS 315210" (~1,332 establishments; ~10,800 employees). 2022. https://labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/qcew/CEW-Detail_NAICS.asp
19. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics / Census Bureau. "NAICS Revision Attachment — 2017 Benchmark Data for 315210" (2,921 establishments in 2017). 2020. https://downloads.regulations.gov/USBC-2020-0004-0028/attachment_1.pdf
20. U.S. Small Business Administration. "Size Standards Analysis — cut and sew apparel (firm size, average assets, employee-based size standards)." 2022. https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2022-08091.pdf
21. USDA Economic Research Service. "Cotton and Wool Market Outlook" (July 2026; production 117.3M bales, mill use 122.0M, ending stocks −6%). https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/cotton-and-wool/market-outlook
22. G-III Apparel Group, Ltd. "Fiscal 2025 Form 10-K" (~76% of product sourced from Vietnam, China, Indonesia; no long-term manufacturing contracts). 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/821002/000155837025003540/giii-20250131x10k.htm
23. Levi Strauss & Co. "Fiscal 2025 Form 10-K" (sourcing from manufacturers in ~32 countries). 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/94845/000009484526000008/lvis-20251130.htm
24. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. "2023 Form 10-K" (Fechheimer ownership). 2024. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1067983/000095017024019719/brka-20231231.htm
25. Maker's Row / SEAMS. "Apparel & Garment Industry Trends in the USA — Reshoring, Small-Batch and On-Demand Manufacturing." 2025–2026. https://makersrow.com/blog/apparel-garment-industry-usa/
26. Child primers: NAICS 31521 — Cut and Sew Apparel Contractors and NAICS 31525 — Cut and Sew Apparel Manufacturing (except Contractors), §§3–8 — source of the branded-company sourcing disclosures (VF ~273 facilities/~30 countries; Kontoor ~30% internal / ~210 contract factories in 19 countries), the uniform-service manufacturing figures (Cintas five plants; UniFirst ~62% of garments), Kontoor's 2024 margins (44.5% gross / 13.1% operating), the ~45,000-worker Los Angeles cluster estimate, the Berry-compliant private supplier names, and the CBP establishment/employment splits by child.