Apparel, Piece Goods, and Notions Merchant Wholesalers (NAICS 4243)

A Histometrics rollup primer for public-market and private investors

1. Overview

NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code 4243 is the four-digit industry group that gathers the middlemen of the soft-goods supply chain: firms that buy clothing, shoes, and the raw fabric and trim that go into them, take legal title (ownership), warehouse the goods, and resell them in smaller lots to retailers, e-commerce sellers, uniform programs, interior designers, and other businesses. They do not make the products, and they do not mainly sell to the walk-in public. They earn a spread between what they pay a factory (usually overseas) and what a customer pays them, plus fees for carrying inventory, extending credit, and absorbing fashion and markdown risk that individual buyers cannot manage alone. [1][3]

For an investor, 4243 is a single economic idea told in three registers: a large, unglamorous, cash-generative distribution business tied to a staple of consumer spending — and structurally low-margin, working-capital heavy, cyclical, and squeezed at the border by tariffs. What makes the group interesting is that its three children are not variations on one theme; they differ sharply in size, pay, concentration, direction, and who owns them. This is also the last level in this branch where aggregation actually happens: each of the three children is itself a single-child pass-through to one six-digit industry (42431→424310, 42434→424340, 42435→424350), so the contrasts drawn here are the only ones the taxonomy offers. [6]

2. What's inside — the three child industries and how they differ

NAICS 4243 contains three five-digit industries. (The former men's/boys' code 424320 and women's/children's code 424330 were merged into a single clothing line, 424350, in the 2022 NAICS revision — which is why the group has three children today rather than four. Any "42435" series running back before 2022 is a splice of the two predecessor codes, not a continuously classified industry.) [3][6]

• 42431 — Piece Goods, Notions, and Other Dry Goods: fabric sold by the bolt plus sewing supplies. Piece goods are lengths of cloth; notions are the small sewn-in items (thread, buttons, zippers, elastic); "other dry goods" adds knitting yarns and hair accessories. [5]
• 42434 — Footwear: finished shoes, almost entirely imported, resold to shoe stores, department stores, off-price and sporting-goods chains, and marketplaces. [4]
• 42435 — Clothing and Clothing Accessories: finished garments and accessories — by far the largest of the three. [3]

The distinctive story of this group is the contrast across those three. They are the same kind of business (title-taking wholesale distribution) but very different businesses:

Sources: receipts, firm and establishment counts, employment, pay and concentration from the 2022 Economic Census and County Business Patterns 2023 as reported in the child primers [3][4][5]; SBA size standards [7]; ownership and proxy detail from the children [8][9][10][12][13][17][18][23].

Four takeaways from the table:

1. One child is two-thirds of the group. Clothing (42435) dwarfs the other two combined; footwear is a distant second; piece goods is a rounding-error-sized, declining niche. Any statement about "the group" is largely a statement about apparel wholesaling.
2. Concentration runs backwards to size — and this level is where you can actually see it. The biggest child (clothing) is the most fragmented (CR4 just 10%); footwear, with the fewest firms, is the most concentrated (CR4 43.7%, CR50 86%). Note a data point unique to the parent: the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index is suppressed in the federal data for both piece goods and footwear, so the group's published HHI of 79.1 is the only such reading that covers all three children. [2][4][5]
3. Pay tracks scale, not the product. Footwear pays about 1.6× what piece goods pays per employee, and its average firm is roughly six times larger by revenue — the group's ~$75,000 average sits between three quite different labor profiles rather than describing any of them. [3][4][5]
4. Ownership mix differs by child, and it is moving. Clothing is thousands of small importers under a thin layer of large private distributors, with a few branded-wholesaler public proxies. Footwear is the only child with even one listed pure-play, and it leans most on brand companies and financial sponsors. Piece goods was described as almost purely family-owned — that is now only half right: Dunes Point Capital acquired Kravet in 2024 (family retaining a stake), showing sponsor ownership is viable at the larger, decorative end. [9] Across all three, the pure distributor is still rarely a listed company.

3. Size (this level's rollup figures)

These are our ground-truth federal statistics for NAICS 4243 as a whole. The three children sum cleanly to the group on receipts: $14.14B + $43.5B + $124.9B ≈ $182.5B. [2][3][4][5]

The children reconcile to the parent. The revised child pages now carry full County Business Patterns detail, and their components tie out exactly against the group: establishments 2,844 + 1,153 + 9,321 = 13,318; employees 21,231 + 28,099 + 123,013 = 172,343; payroll $1.35B + $2.80B + $8.83B = $12.98B. [1][3][4][5] There is no unallocated residual at this level — everything in 4243 sits in one of the three children.

Implied average pay is roughly $75,000 per employee and average revenue per firm about $14.5 million — but both averages are misleading. Pay ranges from ~$63,000 in piece goods to ~$99,700 in footwear, and a handful of billion-dollar distributors sit atop thousands of tiny ones. Establishment counts barely exceed firm counts in every child, which tells you this is a group of single-location and narrowly distributed companies, not national branch networks. [3][4][5]

Concentration: very fragmented overall. For the whole group, the four largest firms account for just 12.2% of receipts, the top eight 17.3%, the top twenty 28.7%, and the top fifty 42.3% — under half the market. [2] The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) — a standard concentration gauge in which anything below 1,500 is considered "unconcentrated" — is 79.1, one of the lowest readings in the entire economy. [2] Note the composition effect: footwear on its own is moderately concentrated (CR4 43.7%, CR50 86%), but it is small, so the group's number is pulled down toward the atomized clothing segment that makes up two-thirds of receipts. [4]

Undercount caveat (important here). These figures capture employer firms whose primary activity is merchant wholesaling. They materially understate the true flow of apparel, footwear, and fabric at wholesale for three reasons:

• Vertically integrated brands are counted elsewhere. Most of the biggest names that push clothing and shoes into US retail — Nike, adidas, New Balance, Skechers, Deckers, Crocs, Wolverine, plus large apparel brands — are "factoryless" marketers that design and source goods but outsource production, and the Census generally files them under manufacturing (apparel 315, footwear 316210) or under their own retail (458), not under 4243. [4][15] For scale: the total US footwear market at retail is roughly $89–97 billion and US footwear imports alone ran about $26.6 billion at customs value in 2025 — against $43.5 billion of measured footwear-wholesale receipts. [4][21]
• Agents and brokers are excluded. Firms that arrange sales for commission without taking title sit in NAICS 425, not here. [5]
• Small and nonemployer sellers are excluded. Independent importers, sales reps, and one-person operations — of which this small-and-family-dominated group has many — fall outside the employer counts. [3][5]

Read the $182.5 billion as the stand-alone, title-taking merchant-wholesaler slice — not the full value of soft goods changing hands between factory and store. [2]

4. Investable universe (where value concentrates across the children)

The blunt fact across all three children is that there is no listed pure-play merchant wholesaler of any real size, and no dedicated exchange-traded fund (ETF). The sharpest way to see it: the largest listed company that is mainly a wholesaler in this whole group is Weyco Group, at roughly $290 million of revenue [13] — while a single brand company's wholesale channel, Deckers', was $3.21 billion of about $5.4 billion in FY2026, and G-III's wholesale segment was $2.87 billion. [11][14] Value sits with whoever owns the brand, or in private hands. Where you can put money differs by child:

• Clothing (42435) — the largest pool, still mostly private. The scaled true distributors are private: SanMar (~$4B, family-owned since 1971, 5,500+ employees, nine regional hubs) and S&S Activewear (owned by Clayton, Dubilier & Rice; its October 2024 purchase of alphabroder created a combined >$4B distributor with 4+ million square feet of warehouse). [10] Public exposure is indirect, through branded-apparel companies whose primary channel is wholesaling finished goods — G-III Apparel Group (GIII) is the truest listed proxy (~97% of sales wholesale), with Kontoor Brands (KTB) ($2.60B revenue, $1.89B US wholesale in FY2024), Superior Group of Companies (SGC) ($566M, FY2024), Columbia Sportswear (COLM) and Levi Strauss (LEVI). [11][12]
• Footwear (42434) — the one small public pure-play. Weyco Group (WEYS) (Florsheim, Nunn Bush, Stacy Adams, BOGS) is essentially the only listed small-cap that is mainly a wholesaler — $228 million, or 79%, of ~$290 million of revenue. [13] Broader exposure comes through vertically integrated brand companies running large wholesale segments — Deckers (DECK), Crocs (CROX) (wholesale 47.9% of revenue), Steven Madden (SHOO) ($1.04B of wholesale footwear revenue in 2025), Wolverine Worldwide (WWW), Caleres (CAL), Genesco (GCO), Designer Brands (DBI), Rocky Brands (RCKY), Birkenstock (BIRK), plus wholesale-plus-DTC models at On Holding (ONON) and Allbirds (BIRD). [14] The pure distributors are private (Vida Shoes, Marc Fisher, BBC International, ELAN Polo, Titan), alongside holding companies (Berkshire Hathaway's Brooks Running, Justin Brands, H.H. Brown), sponsors (3G Capital's ~$9.4B Skechers take-private closed September 12, 2025), and licensing platforms (Authentic Brands Group). [16]
• Piece goods (42431) — no direct public route, but two indirect ones. The leaders are private and split by channel: in sewing and craft, Notions Marketing (family-owned since 1938, 150,000+ SKUs), Checker Distributors (1948, 125,000+ SKUs from 1,000+ suppliers), Brewer Sewing Supplies (operating since 1914); in decorative and contract fabrics, Kravet (~870 employees, 40 showrooms; Lee Jofa, Brunschwig & Fils, Donghia — Dunes Point Capital acquired it in 2024), Fabricut (family-run and employee-owned) and Richloom (third-generation). [8][9] Public exposure comes either from upstream manufacturers — thread and zipper maker Coats Group (COA) (~$1.47B revenue from continuing operations, ~27% global thread share), fabric maker Culp (CULP) ($213.2M net sales FY2025), yarn maker Unifi (UFI) [17] — or from diversified interiors companies that own textile-distribution brands: MillerKnoll (MLKN) (Maharam, Knoll Textiles, Edelman) and Steelcase (SCS) (Designtex), whose textile operations are not separately reported inside much larger furniture businesses. [18] Neither route is a clean proxy for the wholesale layer.

The listed proxies are not industry averages. G-III's wholesale segment fell to $2.87B in the year ended January 2026 from $3.08B, substantially on expiring Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger licenses, with wholesale gross margin compressing to 37.4% from 39.4% primarily on tariffs — and its three largest customers were 20.6%, 11.4% and 11.0% of company sales. [11] Columbia disclosed $31 million of incremental US tariff cost before mitigation against a 50.5% gross margin in 2025. [12] Each proxy carries idiosyncratic license, customer and sourcing risk; none should be valued on a generic "apparel wholesaler multiple." See each child primer for the full company tables. [3][4][5]

5. How the money works

All three children run the same engine: a spread-and-turns distribution model. A wholesaler pays a factory an ex-factory ("FOB") price, adds freight and import duty to reach a landed cost, and resells above that. The gross-margin bands the children report are close but not identical, and they belong to different products: in footwear, mid-30s percent for branded wholesalers and often 15–25% for commodity and private-label distributors [4]; in clothing, high-30s to 40% for branded wholesalers and roughly 20–30% for commodity "blank" distributors competing on price and volume [3]. Use each child's band rather than a blended one.

Because the spread is thin, the model lives or dies on inventory turns and the cash-conversion cycle, not on headline margin. Distributors commit to seasonal orders months ahead, pay duty and freight at import, hold the goods, and extend trade credit to buyers who pay later — so a customer's failure lands directly on receivables. The relevant scorecards are days of inventory, days sales outstanding, days payable, and GMROI (Gross Margin Return On Inventory investment). Durable advantage comes from purchasing scale, SKU (stock-keeping-unit) breadth, warehouse density and fill rate, and supplier depth — not from owning a factory. [4][5]

The revised children now put numbers on the squeeze. Steven Madden's wholesale-footwear gross margin fell to 33.5% in 2025 from 34.6%, and its operating margin from 18.0% to 14.9%, with management attributing the decline principally to US import tariffs. [14] Inventory quality moves margin as much as the spread does: Nike's fiscal 2025 consolidated gross margin fell 190 basis points to 42.7%, roughly 180 of them from lower average selling prices on discounts and channel mix and another ~90 from obsolescence reserves. [15] And reported revenue itself is partly a function of downstream retail performance, since markdown allowances are estimated from retailers' inventory and sell-through data. [14]

Three economics differ by child. Footwear carries the fattest duty tail — average tariffs of about 23.6% against ~7.8% for consumer goods generally, with some styles above 60% — so trade policy flows almost dollar-for-dollar into landed cost. [4][20] Clothing layers on apparel-specific frictions: retailer chargebacks, markdown allowances, receivables factoring, licensing royalties, and concentrated vendor sourcing (G-III bought 36.9% of inventory from Vietnam and 25.0% from China in fiscal 2026, with two Vietnamese vendors alone supplying 27.0% and 15.6%). [11] Piece goods is the lowest-growth and most obsolescence-prone (100,000+ SKU catalogs of slow-moving fabric and trim) — but its decorative and contract channel is a partial exception, closer to a design-and-service franchise wrapped around inventory: exclusive collections, showrooms, specification support, and the willingness to supply small quantities mills will not handle. [5]

6. Demand drivers

The group's demand is a slightly lagged echo of consumer discretionary spending on clothing and shoes, transmitted through the retail inventory cycle — wholesalers boom when retailers restock and suffer when they destock, a swing more violent than end-consumer demand itself. Real personal consumption on clothing and footwear rose 2.6% in 2024 after 1.3% in 2023 and 0.2% in 2022 — a post-pandemic path steep enough that recent growth rates should not be extrapolated mechanically. [25] Shared drivers: employment and incomes; fashion newness and seasonality (boots in fall, sandals in spring, back-to-school and holiday peaks); input and freight costs (cotton, synthetics, ocean freight, tariffs); and the channel shift to e-commerce, now roughly a third of footwear sales and its largest single channel, which rewards fast, drop-ship-capable distributors and disintermediates slow ones. [4][26]

The amplification is measurable at the border: US footwear imports fell 23.7% to $20.7 billion in 2020, then rebounded 31.4% to $27.2 billion in 2021 — retailers cut orders faster than consumers cut purchases, and restock faster too. [4]

The children diverge on secular direction:

• Footwear has a replacement-driven floor (about 5.39 pairs and roughly $350 per person a year) that apparel lacks, so demand is steadier even if margins are squeezed; a private estimate puts US footwear wholesaling near $46.7 billion in 2026 after roughly flat growth of about 0.9% a year. [4][23] The blurring of athletic and casual wear keeps volume broad. [15]
• Clothing is large and mature — flat-to-modest volume growth, cyclical, and increasingly split between fast restock demand and destock gluts, with employment and corporate budgets driving the uniform, workwear and promotional segments. [3][26]
• Piece goods is in secular decline in its core: US cut-and-sew garment manufacturing moved offshore decades ago, the home-sewing hobby spiked in COVID-19 and then normalized down against an aging core demographic, and the 2025 liquidation of fabric retailer JOANN (all ~800 stores closed by May 2025) removed a major downstream buyer; the surviving fabric/craft/sewing retail market is roughly $5.2 billion in 2026 and shrinking about 0.7% a year. [23][24] Its decorative half runs on a different clock — interior design, housing, and commercial refurbishment in hospitality, cruise, office, healthcare and education, where a specified fabric generates repeat orders. [5][17]

7. Regulation

Merchant wholesalers are lightly regulated as businesses — no rate-setting, no heavy licensing — but heavily exposed as importers, and this is the group's dominant regulatory theme. The common exposures, enforced at or near the customs border:

• Tariffs and trade policy. The Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) sets duties by product — textiles and apparel in chapters 50–63, footwear in chapter 64 — layered with Section 301 China duties (which cover roughly 70% of US textile and apparel imports from China, at 7.5–25% stacked on base rates) and the 2025 "reciprocal" regime on major sourcing countries, including a 20% US tariff on Vietnamese goods effective August 7, 2025 (40% on transshipped goods). [20][21][28] This is the single biggest swing factor for landed cost. Both soft-goods children now carry roughly comparable average rates — footwear ~23.6%, apparel estimated in the low-to-mid-20s — about three times the ~7.8% consumer-goods average, with footwear's peaks (>60%) and dollar bill the larger: importers paid about $6.22 billion in footwear duties in 2025. [3][4][20][21]
• Forced-labor enforcement. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA, 2022) creates a rebuttable presumption that puts the documentation burden on the importer and lets US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detain Xinjiang-linked cotton and other shipments; apparel and cotton are enforcement priorities. Detained shipments reached nearly $3.7 billion by mid-2025, and the 2025 strategy update brought the entity list to 144 Chinese entities. [29]
• Labeling, origin and product safety. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fiber-content, care, and country-of-origin rules (Textile Fiber Products Identification Act, Wool Products Labeling Act) — with a 2026 FTC "Made in USA" sweep that included an action against a footwear company over imported uppers and outsoles; Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) flammability and children's-product rules under the Flammable Fabrics Act and the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), including 100 ppm lead limits and Children's Product Certificates for footwear for children 12 and under; CBP country-of-origin marking, where unmarked goods face an additional 10% ad valorem duty; and, for military combat footwear, the Berry Amendment's domestic-sourcing requirement. [4][31]
• The end of "de minimis." The repeal of the sub-$800 duty-free de minimis exemption, effective for all countries on August 29, 2025, raised costs for low-value cross-border parcels and reshaped the marketplace-import channel. [30]
• State chemical and producer-responsibility rules — the growing edge. This is genuinely new at this pass. California AB 1817 bars distributing most new textile articles containing regulated PFAS from January 1, 2025 at a total-organic-fluorine threshold of 100 ppm, tightening to 50 ppm in 2027, making supplier certificates of compliance a live distributor concern; California's SB 707 (Responsible Textile Recovery Act) pulls covered apparel producers into a producer-responsibility organization with collection, reporting and fee obligations; Proposition 65 applies across all three children. [32]

8. Consolidation

By the federal data the group is atomized (CR4 12.2%, HHI 79.1), but the trend and its drivers differ by child. [2]

• Consolidation at the top. Sharpest in the clothing group's promotional/imprintable niche, where S&S Activewear's October 2024 purchase of alphabroder — backed by Clayton, Dubilier & Rice — created a >$4B distributor rivaling SanMar, with the purchasing power, SKU breadth and warehouse density for same-day shipping. [10] In footwear, financial sponsors keep getting bigger (3G Capital's ~$9.4B take-private of Skechers, completed September 12, 2025; Steven Madden's 2025 Kurt Geiger acquisition and private-label push; Wolverine's sale of Sperry to Authentic Brands Group and ABG's roll-up of footwear licenses). [14][16] Piece goods consolidates slowly among distributors serving the shrinking quilt/craft channel — but Dunes Point Capital's 2024 Kravet deal shows the decorative end is now large enough for sponsor ownership. [5][9]
• Disintermediation — but it is no longer one-way. Brands still prune wholesale accounts (Crocs' wholesale channel fell from 52.0% of revenue in 2023 to 47.9% in 2025; Deckers is consolidating Ugg around its best partners while adding Hoka doors selectively), retailers source direct, and cross-border marketplaces (Shein, Temu) bypass the domestic middleman. [14][26] The children now also carry the counter-evidence: Nike has decided to reinvest in wholesale distribution after overemphasizing direct channels, on the view that multi-brand shelf space and discovery still carry value. [15][26] The parent's earlier flat "brands are leaving wholesale" framing overstated a genuine but two-directional shift.
• Tariffs reshuffle sourcing; they do not repatriate it. The United States Fashion Industry Association's 2025 survey of 30 leading brands, retailers, importers and wholesalers found sourcing spread across 46 countries, with 60% expecting to add sourcing countries — generally away from China — while only 17% planned to increase US-made sourcing in response to tariffs. [27] Border-cost exposure is a persistent structural feature of this group, not a transition cost.
• Downstream failure risk. Retail bankruptcies (JOANN in fabric; various apparel and shoe chains) both remove buyers and concentrate surviving demand into fewer, more powerful accounts. [24]

The through-line: scale, logistics density, and either owning a brand or running an efficient private-label/DTC program separate a few (mostly private) billion-dollar winners from a thinning long tail. [26]

9. Risks

The children share a risk profile, with different emphasis:

• Trade-policy shock (the dominant risk). With most goods imported and duties high in both apparel and footwear, any tariff increase compresses the spread immediately, and UFLPA detentions can strand inventory outright. Steven Madden's 2025 margin compression and G-III's wholesale gross-margin decline are direct evidence that the 2025 actions were not fully neutralized. [11][14][29]
• Sourcing concentration — and a measurement gap worth knowing. The two available footwear measures rank origins differently: by import value in 2024, China was 35.8%, Vietnam 32.4%, Indonesia 9.3%; by volume in 2025, China was 47.8% of the 2.015 billion pairs imported, Vietnam 28.5%, Indonesia 9.6%. [4][19][22] The gap reflects mix — China ships more, cheaper pairs — not conflicting data, but duty exposure and unit exposure concentrate in different places. On the apparel side, G-III's Vietnam/China split (36.9%/25.0%) shows the same clustering. [11]
• Disintermediation. Brands going direct and retailers sourcing direct can bypass the wholesaler; marketplaces do it at scale. [26]
• Cyclicality and the inventory whip. Discretionary demand swings, amplified by the restock/destock cycle, hit wholesalers harder than end retailers. [26]
• Working-capital and markdown risk. Seasonal inventory is bought on forecast months ahead; a missed trend forces markdowns that erase the spread. [11][14]
• Customer concentration and credit risk. A few large retail buyers — visible even in the listed proxy, whose top three customers are 20.6%, 11.4% and 11.0% of sales, and whose selling costs carried higher bad-debt expense from retailer bankruptcies. A failure wipes out receivables (JOANN owed suppliers ~$133M at collapse). [11][24]
• License durability. In the branded-wholesale proxies, an expiring or lost brand license can strand people, inventory and distribution capacity in a single year — as G-III's Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger expirations show. [11]
• Chemical regulation and sustainability expectations. New at this pass: PFAS rules such as AB 1817 create both compliance burden and the risk of stranding non-compliant inventory, and buyers increasingly ask for recycled content and traceability while genuine textile-to-textile circularity remains marginal — under 1% of global fiber supply in 2024 came from recycled textiles. [32][33]
• Secular decline in the piece-goods child specifically, plus inventory obsolescence on huge slow-moving SKU catalogs. [5][23]

10. How to invest & outlook

There is no clean listed way to own "apparel wholesaling." The realistic routes, by child:

• Public (approximations only, and mostly brands, not distributors). For clothing, G-III (GIII) as the truest wholesale proxy, plus Kontoor (KTB), Superior Group (SGC), Columbia (COLM) and Levi (LEVI). For footwear, Weyco (WEYS) as the sole small-cap pure-play, or branded shoe companies with large wholesale segments (DECK, CROX, SHOO, WWW, CAL, GCO, DBI, RCKY, BIRK, ONON). For piece goods, only upstream manufacturers (COA, CULP, UFI) or diversified interiors owners (MLKN, SCS), whose textile brands are not separately reported. Treat these as cyclical, inventory-heavy names priced on where retail inventories sit in the cycle, on wholesale-segment margin and DTC penetration, and on tariff exposure by sourcing country — not as steady compounders. (Tickers belong to this section only.) [11][12][13][14][17][18]
• Private (where most of the industry actually sits and changes hands). Acquiring or backing a regional distributor — often via family-business succession, since several leaders were founded between 1914 and 1971 and are now second- or third-generation — joining the private-equity roll-ups (sharpest in the promotional/imprintable clothing niche, now open in decorative fabrics too), or lending against the sector through factoring and asset-based finance. This is where the scaled winners already are: SanMar, S&S/alphabroder, Kravet. [8][9][10] Diligence centers on inventory ageing and markdown reserves, gross margin after freight and duty, customer and vendor concentration, license duration and trademark ownership, receivable quality, borrowing-base availability, tariff and FX pass-through, and compliance documentation.

Outlook. End demand is a mature staple with a replacement-driven floor in footwear, but the economics are structurally thin and tariff-exposed, and 2026–2027 margins hinge on the level and stability of the tariff regime — which the revised children suggest will keep reshuffling sourcing across more countries rather than returning production home. [27] Value is steadily migrating to brand owners, large private distributors, and financial sponsors and away from the classic independent middleman, though Nike's return to wholesale is a reminder that multi-brand distribution retains real function. [15] Net judgment: across all three children, 4243 is a cash-flow, execution, and consolidation story for private owners and brand-adjacent public investors — not a growth sector to own directly through the wholesale layer. For full detail on any child, read its primer — 42431, 42434, or 42435. [3][4][5]

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023 — NAICS 4243 (13,318 establishments; 172,343 employees; $12.98B annual payroll; $3.32B Q1 payroll). (Histometrics ingested federal statistics.) https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
2. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration and receipts, NAICS 4243 (receipts $182.5B; 12,591 firms; CR4 12.2%, CR8 17.3%, CR20 28.7%, CR50 42.3%; HHI 79.1). (Histometrics ingested federal statistics.) https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
3. Histometrics child primer, NAICS 42435 — Clothing and Clothing Accessories Merchant Wholesalers (receipts $124.9B; 9,208 firms; CR4 10%, CR8 16.4%, CR20 29%, CR50 42.8%; HHI 56.3; 123,013 employees, $8.83B payroll, 9,321 establishments, ~$71,800 average pay; ~$13.6M average revenue per firm; branded gross margins high-30s–40%, blank distributors ~20–30%), citing 2022 Economic Census / County Business Patterns 2023 (Census industry 424350). https://data.census.gov/
4. Histometrics child primer, NAICS 42434 — Footwear Merchant Wholesalers (receipts $43.5B; 1,152 firms; 1,153 establishments; 28,099 employees; $2.80B payroll; $790M Q1 payroll; implied pay ~$99,700; CR4 43.7%, CR8 56.2%, CR20 73.1%, CR50 86%; HHI suppressed; branded gross margins mid-30s, commodity 15–25%; ~5.39 pairs and ~$350 per person a year; US retail market ~$89–97B; 2020 imports −23.7% to $20.7B, 2021 +31.4% to $27.2B), citing 2022 Economic Census / County Business Patterns 2023 (Census industry 424340). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html; https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
5. Histometrics child primer, NAICS 42431 — Piece Goods, Notions, and Other Dry Goods Merchant Wholesalers (receipts $14.14B; 2,250 firms; 2,844 establishments; 21,231 employees; $1.35B payroll; $333M Q1 payroll; ~$6.3M per firm; ~$63,000 per employee; CR4 13.1%, CR8 19.6%, CR20 33.7%, CR50 48.3%; HHI suppressed; sewing/craft vs. decorative and contract fabric channels), citing 2022 Economic Census / County Business Patterns 2023 (Census industry 424310). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html; https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
6. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS definitions and Wholesale Trade FAQ (industry group 4243 structure; merchant-wholesaler definition; single-child structure of 42431/42434/42435), and Federal Register, "Small Business Size Standards: Adoption of 2022 NAICS for Size Standards" (merger of 424320 and 424330 into 424350). 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=424&input=424&year=2022; https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census/year/2022/about/faq/faq-wholesale.html; https://thefederalregister.org/documents/2022-13250/small-business-size-standards-adoption-of-2022-north-american-industry-classification-system-for-size-standards
7. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Table of Small Business Size Standards" — 424310 (100 employees), 424340 (200 employees), 424350 (150 employees; 97.1% of predecessor firms would qualify as small). 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
8. Company profiles — Notions Marketing (family-owned since 1938; 150,000+ SKUs), Checker Distributors (founded 1948; 125,000+ SKUs from 1,000+ suppliers), Brewer Sewing Supplies (operating since 1914), Kravet (Lee Jofa, Brunschwig & Fils, Donghia), Fabricut (family-run, employee-owned), Richloom (third-generation). 2025. https://www.notionsmarketing.com/; https://www.checkerdist.com/; https://likesew.com/blog/wholesale-fabric-suppliers; https://www.kravet.com/our-story; https://fabricut.com/about; https://richloom.com/about/
9. Dunes Point Capital, "Acquisition of Kravet LLC" (2024; ~870 employees, 40 showrooms worldwide; family retained a stake). 2024. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dunes-point-capital-lp-announces-the-acquisition-of-kravet-llc-302321257.html
10. Promotional Products Association International / ASI Central, "S&S Activewear Completes Acquisition of alphabroder" and SanMar coverage; Clayton, Dubilier & Rice portfolio page; SanMar company overview (SanMar ~$4B, family-owned since 1971, 5,500+ employees, nine regional hubs; S&S/alphabroder combined >$4B and 4+ million sq ft, completed October 2024). 2024–2025. https://www.ppai.org/media-hub/s-s-activewear-finalizes-alphabroder-acquisition/; https://members.asicentral.com/news/industry-news/october-2024/ss-activewear-completes-the-acquisition-of-alphabroder/; https://www.cdr.com/portfolio/s-and-s; https://www.sanmar.com/aboutus/meetourleaders; https://www.alphabroder.com/static/pdf/SSActivewearCompletetesAcquisitionofAlphaBroder.pdf
11. G-III Apparel Group, Ltd., Form 10-K, fiscal year ended January 31, 2026 (~97% of sales wholesale; wholesale segment $2.87B vs. $3.08B prior year; wholesale gross margin 37.4% vs. 39.4%; top three customers 20.6%, 11.4%, 11.0%; inventory sourcing 36.9% Vietnam, 25.0% China; Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger license expirations; bad-debt expense from retailer bankruptcies). U.S. SEC, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/821002/000110465926033891/giii-20260131x10k.htm
12. Wholesale-heavy listed apparel companies — Kontoor Brands (revenue $2.60B, U.S. wholesale $1.89B, FY2024); Superior Group of Companies (revenue ~$566M, FY2024); Columbia Sportswear ($31M incremental U.S. tariff cost before mitigation; 50.5% gross margin, 6.1% operating margin, 2025); Levi Strauss & Co. 2025–2026. https://www.kontoorbrands.com/news-media/press-release/194/kontoor-brands-reports-2024-fourth-quarter-and-full-year; https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/sgc/revenue/; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1050797/000105079726000005/colmfy25q4exhibit991.htm; https://www.levistrauss.com/
13. Weyco Group (NASDAQ: WEYS), full-year results (revenue ~$290M, of which $228M — 79% — wholesale; Florsheim, Nunn Bush, Stacy Adams, BOGS). GlobeNewswire, 2025. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/03/04/3036941/0/en/Weyco-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2024-Results.html
14. Branded footwear filings — Deckers Brands Form 10-K FY2026 (wholesale channel $3.21B of ~$5.4B); Crocs, Inc. Form 10-K FY2025 (wholesale 47.9% of revenue, down from 52.0% in 2023); Steven Madden, Ltd. Form 10-K FY2025 ($1.04B wholesale footwear revenue; wholesale-footwear gross margin 33.5% vs. 34.6%; operating margin 14.9% vs. 18.0%; markdown allowances; Kurt Geiger acquisition). U.S. SEC, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/910521/000162828026037664/deck-20260331.htm; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1334036/000133403626000006/crox-20251231.htm; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/913241/000162828026012995/shoo-20251231.htm
15. Nike, Inc., Form 10-K FY2025 (outsourced production and offshore footwear manufacturing; FY2025 gross margin 42.7%, down 190 bps; reinvestment in wholesale distribution; athletic footwear worn for leisure; materials and factory concentration). U.S. SEC, 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320187/000032018725000047/nke-20250531.htm
16. Skechers, "3G Capital Completes Acquisition of Skechers" (~$9.4B take-private, completed September 12, 2025). 2025. https://about.skechers.com/press-release/3g-capital-completes-acquisition-of-skechers
17. Upstream manufacturers — Coats Group plc 2025 Full Year Results (~$1.47B revenue from continuing operations; ~27% global thread share); Culp, Inc. Form 10-K FY2025 (net sales $213.2M; weak upholstery demand tied to home furnishings and housing); Unifi, Inc. Form 10-K FY2025. 2025–2026. https://cdn.coats.com/wp-content/uploads/Coats-Group-plc-2025-Full-Year-Results-Announcement.pdf; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/723603/000095017025095233/culp-20250427.htm; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/100726/000095017025111331/ufi-20250629.htm
18. Diversified interiors companies owning textile-distribution brands — MillerKnoll, Inc. Form 10-K 2025 (Maharam, Knoll Textiles, Edelman); Steelcase Inc. Form 10-K 2025 (Designtex). U.S. SEC, 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/66382/000006638225000069/mlkn-20250531.htm; https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1050825/000105082525000069/scs-20250228.htm
19. Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America (FDRA), Sourcing & Compliance (~99% of US footwear imported; 2025 pairs imported and country volume shares — 2.015 billion pairs, China 47.8%, Vietnam 28.5%, Indonesia 9.6%). https://fdra.org/key-issues-and-advocacy/sourcing-compliance/
20. US Tariff Rates, "Chapter 64: Footwear — 2026 US Tariff Rates & HTS Codes" (average ~23.6% vs. ~7.8% for consumer goods generally; peak >60%); Harmonized Tariff Schedule chapters 50–64. https://ustariffrates.com/tariffs/64
21. Eightx, "Footwear Import and Tariff Tracker 2026" (2025 import value ~$26.6B customs; ~$6.22B in footwear duties paid in 2025; 20% Vietnam tariff effective August 7, 2025, 40% on transshipped goods; China Section 301 duties of 7.5–25%). 2026. https://eightx.co/blog/footwear-import-tariff-tracker-2026
22. U.S. International Trade Commission, "Footwear Trade Figures 2024" (country shares by import value: China 35.8%, Vietnam 32.4%, Indonesia 9.3%). 2024. https://www.usitc.gov/system/files/research_and_analysis/tradeshifts/2024/files/footwear_figures.html
23. IBISWorld, "Footwear Wholesaling in the US" (~$46.7B in 2026 after ~0.9% annual growth) and "Fabric, Craft & Sewing Supplies Stores in the US" (~$5.2B in 2026; declining ~0.7% CAGR 2021–2026). 2026. https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/footwear-wholesaling/969/; https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/market-size/fabric-craft-sewing-supplies-stores/1081/
24. Axios / NPR / Fortune, "Joann Fabrics closing all stores in 2025 bankruptcy" (all ~800 stores closed by May 2025; ~$133M owed to suppliers). 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/02/24/joann-fabrics-closing-all-stores-bankruptcy
25. U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2025 Annual Update of National Economic Accounts — real personal consumption expenditures on clothing and footwear (+2.6% in 2024; +1.3% in 2023; +0.2% in 2022). 2025. https://apps.bea.gov/scb/issues/2025/11-november/1125-nea-annual-update.htm
26. WWD / Sourcing Journal (JOOR), wholesale channel trends — DTC pivots back to wholesale; disintermediation from vertical brands and cross-border marketplaces (Shein, Temu). 2025. https://wwd.com/sourcing-journal/sj-denim/joor-wholesale-trends-2025-dtc-luxury-brand-management-companies-independent-retailers-1238845172/
27. United States Fashion Industry Association, 2025 Fashion Industry Benchmarking Study (30 leading brands, retailers, importers and wholesalers; sourcing across 46 countries; 60% expect to add sourcing countries; 17% plan to increase U.S.-made sourcing). 2025. https://www.usfashionindustry.com/press/press-releases/usfia-releases-twelfth-annual-benchmarking-study
28. Sheng Lu / FASH455, Fibre2Fashion, and Easyship trade-policy analyses (Section 301 coverage of ~70% of Chinese textile and apparel imports; average applied U.S. apparel tariff estimated in the low-to-mid-20s percent; 2025 reciprocal tariffs; sourcing shifts to Vietnam, Cambodia, Pakistan). 2025. https://shenglufashion.com/2025/09/09/patterns-of-u-s-apparel-imports-updated-september-2025/; https://www.easyship.com/blog/section-321-de-minimis-changes
29. U.S. Department of Homeland Security / CSIS and USTR / Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force — Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act enforcement (apparel and cotton priority; ~$3.7B in detained shipments by mid-2025; 2025 strategy update bringing the entity list to 144 Chinese entities). 2025. https://www.dhs.gov/uflpa-frequently-asked-questions; https://www.csis.org/analysis/assessing-impact-uyghur-forced-labor-prevention-act-after-three-years; https://www.ustr.gov/about/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2025/august/forced-labor-enforcement-task-force-release-2025-update-uflpa-strategy
30. The White House / Congressional Research Service, "Suspending Duty-Free De Minimis Treatment for All Countries" (effective August 29, 2025); CRS R48380 on Section 321. 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/suspending-duty-free-de-minimis-treatment-for-all-countries/; https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48380
31. Labeling, origin and product-safety regimes — FTC Textile Fiber Products Identification Act and Care Labeling Rule; FTC "Made in USA" sweep (April 2026, including a footwear action); CPSC 16 CFR Part 1610 flammability and CPSIA children's-product requirements; CBP country-of-origin marking (additional 10% ad valorem on unmarked goods) and CPSIA footwear certificates; Congressional Research Service, Berry Amendment (IF13001). 2025–2026. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/threading-your-way-through-labeling-requirements-under-textile-wool-acts; https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/04/ftc-announces-made-usa-sweep-including-three-law-enforcement-actions-protect-american-consumers; https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-II/subchapter-D/part-1610; https://www.compliancegate.com/shoes-and-footwear-regulations-united-states/; https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF13001
32. California Legislature — AB 1817, "PFAS in Textiles" (100 ppm total organic fluorine from January 1, 2025; 50 ppm from 2027) and SB 707, "Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2024" (producer-responsibility organization, collection, reporting and fee obligations). 2022–2024. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billCompareClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB1817&showamends=false; https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB707
33. Textile Exchange, "Materials Market Report 2025" (less than 1% of global fiber supply in 2024 came from pre- or post-consumer recycled textiles). 2025. https://textileexchange.org/knowledge-center/reports/materials-market-report-2025/