Fabric Mills (United States, NAICS 3132): An Investor's Primer

NAICS 2022 industry group (four-digit) 3132. A Histometrics rollup primer for public-market and private investors. NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the U.S. government's official way of grouping businesses; a four-digit "industry group" sits one level above the five- and six-digit detail industries beneath it.

The one-paragraph version. "Fabric Mills" is the part of U.S. textiles that turns yarn or raw fiber into cloth (as opposed to spinning yarn, or sewing cloth into clothing). It is four very different businesses stapled together under one code: weaving wide cloth (denim, upholstery), weaving narrow strips (seat-belt webbing, elastic, ribbon), bonding fibers into engineered sheet without weaving (diaper stock, wipes, filters, house wrap), and knitting (stretchy T-shirt and athletic cloth). Each of those four is itself a single-child pass-through to one six-digit industry, so this level is the last place the group genuinely subdivides — the four-way split is the whole analytical content. One of the four — nonwovens — is more than half the money and the only real growth engine; the other three are small, mature, import-battered specialty survivors whose contraction has been severe (broadwoven weaving alone shed 84.8% of its jobs between 2000 and 2024).[2] Across the whole group, public-market access is thin: essentially one genuine U.S.-listed pure-play exists (a nonwovens producer), one micro-cap straddles two of the other children, and everything else is private, upstream, adjacent, or foreign-listed.

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1. Overview

A fabric mill sits in the middle of the textile chain. Upstream, fiber-and-yarn mills spin cotton or extrude polyester into thread (NAICS 31311); downstream, cut-and-sew plants stitch cloth into garments and goods (NAICS 315/314). Fabric Mills is the step in between — the mills that make the fabric itself.[1]

There are four ways to make fabric, and NAICS gives each its own industry:

• Weave wide cloth — interlace yarns on a loom into cloth wider than 12 inches (denim, shirting, upholstery, mattress ticking, technical fabric). This is NAICS 31321.[2]
• Weave narrow strips — the same idea but 12 inches or less: seat-belt webbing, elastic waistbands, ribbon, lifting slings, plus industrial "Schiffli" machine embroidery and lace. NAICS 31322.[3]
• Bond fibers directly into sheet — skip weaving and knitting entirely; melt plastic resin or lay loose fiber and fuse it by heat, water jets, chemicals, or needles into engineered cloth (diaper stock, wet wipes, surgical gowns, N95 filter media, house wrap, road-bed fabric). NAICS 31323.[4]
• Knit — loop yarn into stretchy cloth (T-shirts, athletic wear, swimwear, medical bandage). NAICS 31324.[5]

For an investor the group has one dominant fact and one recurring theme. The dominant fact: these four are largely not one market. A seat-belt-webbing weaver and a diaper-stock nonwovens giant do not compete with each other, do not sell to the same customers, and do not earn the same margins — so the group's economics are really the weighted average of four separate businesses, and one of them (nonwovens) drives the result. The one important qualification, now documented in the children, is that the four do collide at the edges: knitted mattress fabrics have pushed down from premium into mid- and lower-price beds and are used in nearly all compressed or boxed bedding, taking share directly from woven ticking, and the knit primer lists wovens, nonwovens, films, and molded components as live substitutes in its own end markets.[2][5] Technology substitution inside the group is a real, if secondary, dynamic.

The recurring theme: three of the four (broadwoven, narrow, knit) are the classic story of a mature U.S. manufacturing niche that lost commodity volume to imports over 30 years and survives by going up-market into technical, defense, medical, and automotive fabric where "Made in USA," speed, and quality matter more than price. The fourth (nonwovens) is a different animal — a capital-intensive, scale-driven process industry with genuine secular growth.[2][3][4][5]

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

The four children are wildly unequal in size, opposite in direction, and different in who owns them and how (if at all) you can buy them. This contrast — not the group total — is the real analytical content of this level. Note also that none of the four subdivides further in any meaningful way: 31321, 31322, 31323, and 31324 each contain exactly one six-digit national industry (313210, 313220, 313230, 313240), so their primers are pass-throughs to that single child.[2][3][4][5]

(NYSE = New York Stock Exchange; HKEX = Hong Kong Exchange; TWSE = Taiwan Stock Exchange; PE = private equity.)

How to read the table. Three things jump out:

1. Nonwovens is the industry group. At ~57% of receipts and the only child that is genuinely growing, it is the single most important thing to understand about "Fabric Mills." The weaving and knitting children are the legacy of the industry; nonwovens is its future.[4]
2. Capital intensity runs opposite to labor. Nonwovens is ~57% of revenue but only ~42% of employment, because it is the most automated, process-plant-like of the four — it earns roughly $460,000 of revenue per worker, versus ~$273,000 (broadwoven), ~$247,000 (knit), and ~$200,000 (narrow).[2][3][4][5] Nonwovens is a plastics-and-utilization business; the other three are conversion-and-craft businesses. One caveat on the broadwoven figure: it uses the Census employment count of 13,276, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports 18,412 broadwoven workers for 2024 — on that basis the same $3.63 billion of shipments spreads to roughly $200,000 per worker, below knit rather than above it.[2] The ordering of nonwovens against the rest is not in doubt; the ordering among the three legacy children is survey-dependent.
3. Public access is nearly absent — except in nonwovens. Add up the four children and the entire U.S. Fabric Mills group offers essentially one true listed domestic pure-play (Magnera). Every other route is a micro-cap, an adjacent name, an upstream fiber/yarn proxy, a foreign listing, or a private company. For most investors this is a private-market and specialty story, not a stock-picking one.

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3. Size (this level's rollup figures)

These are our ground-truth federal figures for NAICS 3132, with the four children shown so you can see where the mass sits.[1]

(EC = the U.S. Census Bureau's Economic Census, taken every five years, most recent 2022; CBP = its annual County Business Patterns, most recent 2023. The children sum cleanly on plant and headcount: 234+173+227+102 = 736 establishments; 13,276+4,926+16,687+5,228 = 40,117 employees — exactly the group totals. Firms do not: the children report 228+154+182+97 = 661 against a group figure of 651, because a company operating in two child industries is counted once at the group level and once in each child.)

Put plainly, all of U.S. Fabric Mills is a ~$13.6 billion, ~40,000-worker, ~736-plant slice of the economy — tiny relative to a U.S. economy measured in tens of trillions, and tiny even within textiles: the broader U.S. textile-mill workforce was roughly 89,000 in 2024, and the entire textile-and-apparel supply chain from fiber to finished product employed about 453,000 people on $60.9 billion of shipments in 2025.[2] The group runs at about $339,000 of revenue per worker and pays roughly $54,000 per worker on average — with the two legacy children that report it running below that line (~$48,000 in broadwoven, ~$47,000 in knit), which is another way of seeing that nonwovens carries the group's productivity and pay.[1][2][5] With 651 firms operating 736 plants, most firms run one or two mills, not a large chain; in knit the ratio is starkest, at 97 firms to ~102 establishments.[1][5]

How far the legacy children have fallen. The three weaving-and-knitting children are what remains after a generational contraction, and the revised child primers now put numbers on it. Broadwoven employment fell 84.8%, from 120,867 jobs in 2000 to 18,412 in 2024 — one of the largest declines of any detailed U.S. manufacturing industry over that span; the 2002 Economic Census counted 758 broadwoven establishments, 80,530 employees, and $11.4 billion of shipments against $3.63 billion today.[2] Knit shrank about 30% in establishments and employment in a single decade, from 178 companies and 7,474 employees in 2012.[5] Schiffli machine embroidery went from 357 firms and roughly 6,000 workers in 1977 to well under 2,000 workers by 2000.[3] Nothing comparable happened in nonwovens, which is precisely why it now dominates the group.

Undercount caveat — the direction depends on the child. These are permitted, taxed factories, so unlike (say) landscaping or child care there is no large informal or individually owned segment hiding from the surveys. The undercount here runs a different way, and differently by child:

• Captive and vertically integrated production is booked elsewhere. Consumer-goods giants such as Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble spin their own nonwovens in-house to feed diaper and wipe lines, and that output is generally classified under the parent's primary industry (sanitary paper products, NAICS 322291), not here; DuPont's flashspun Tyvek and glass-fiber mats can land in chemical or glass codes.[4] Diversified textile firms such as Milliken and Glen Raven weave and knit as one step inside plants the Census may classify under the company's primary product, and in narrow fabrics a firm that weaves its own webbing but sells a finished harness or automotive assembly is classified by that end product.[2][3][5] So the ~$13.6 billion measures the market-sold slice and understates how much fabric the U.S. actually makes — the gap is largest in nonwovens.
• The market is larger than domestic production — but by very different multiples. These figures measure U.S. production, not U.S. consumption, and the revised children show the gap is not uniform. On the commodity apparel end it is enormous: imports led by China dwarf domestic woven and knit output, and in narrow fabrics Asia-Pacific alone accounts for roughly two-thirds of the global webbing market (about $4.2 billion in 2023).[2][3][5] Nonwovens is the exception — North America imported 403,900 tonnes and exported 98,700 tonnes in 2022, leaving net imports of 305,200 tonnes, equal to just 6.5% of regional production; nonwovens is a heavy, bulky, freight-sensitive product made close to where it is used.[4] For global scale: the nonwovens market is estimated near $44 billion, and narrow woven fabrics at roughly $4.9 billion by 2033 (about 5.2% compound annual growth).[3][4]

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

Value in this group is concentrated in one child (nonwovens) and, within every child, in a handful of scale players plus a specialty tail — but almost all of it is reached privately.

• Nonwovens (31323) — where the only real public exposure lives. The single U.S.-listed pure-play in the whole group is Magnera (NYSE: MAGN), the world's largest nonwovens producer (~$3.2B FY2025 revenue), created by the 2024 Berry Global / Glatfelter merger — and a concentrated one, with its largest customer at ~14% of FY2025 sales and its ten largest at ~42%.[4] Beyond it, nonwoven lines sit inside diversified public companies — Mativ (MATV) in filtration, healthcare, and industrial media, DuPont (Tyvek), Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble (captive hygiene), Amcor (post-Berry Global), Owens Corning (glass mats), and Berkshire Hathaway's Johns Manville (~$725M of nonwovens sales in 2024) — plus international listings (Indorama Ventures/Avgol, Toray, Suominen). Much of the field is private or PE-owned (Freudenberg, Fitesa, Ahlstrom, Alkegen, Hollingsworth & Vose).[4]
• Broadwoven (31321) — private majors, thin public edges. The real assets are private: Milliken & Company, Glen Raven (Sunbrella), Elevate Textiles (Cone Denim, Burlington — Elevate has agreed to sell a majority stake in Cone Denim to Pakistan's Artistic Milliners, expected to close in Q1 2026), and Mount Vernon Mills (~750 employees, six U.S. facilities, and potential output of 90 million yards a year at its Trion, Georgia plant).[2] Public options are edge cases — a micro-cap woven-fabric maker (Culp, net sales ~$204M in FY2026), an adjacent engineered-woven industrial name (Albany International, NYSE: AIN, whose machine-clothing segment ran ~$708M in 2025 with more than 80% from paper-machine clothing), and an upstream yarn proxy (Unifi, NYSE: UFI, ~$571M FY2025).[2]
• Knit (31324) — almost entirely private, with one imperfect listed read-through. There is still no clean public pure-play, but the revised child identifies Culp as the nearest listed exposure: its mattress-fabric segment (~$114M in FY2025, at a 7.0% segment gross margin) includes knitted fabrics alongside wovens and sewn covers, which makes it a usable read on domestic knitting utilization, yarn costs, and bedding demand.[5] Unifi remains an upstream yarn proxy, not a knitter. The mills themselves are family-owned specialists — Beverly Knits (the largest U.S. circular-knit specialist), Contempora Fabrics (employee-owned), Gehring Textiles, Apex Mills, and Texollini (bought by South Korea's Hansae in 2024) — plus knit divisions of large private firms such as Milliken (owner of Polartec).[5]
• Narrow (31322) — private at home, listed only abroad. The recognizable U.S. names (Bally Ribbon Mills, Asheboro Elastics/AEC, Murdock Webbing, Wayne Mills, OTEX Specialty Narrow Fabrics) are all private. Public exposure is indirect: foreign-listed makers Best Pacific International (HKEX: 2111, ~$538M revenue) and Taiwan Paiho (TWSE: 9938, ~US$400M), upstream suppliers Unifi and Avient (NYSE: AVNT), or a downstream buyer such as seat-belt maker Autoliv (NYSE: ALV, $10.8B revenue and a 10.3% adjusted operating margin in 2025).[3]

Two things are worth noticing across those bullets. First, Culp is the only listed name that touches two children at once — its mattress-fabric business spans woven ticking and knitted covers, which is exactly the substitution frontier described in §1; it is also the one place the child primers disagree on a fact, the broadwoven primer listing it on the NYSE and the knit primer on NASDAQ.[2][5] Second, there is no dedicated fabric-mills, nonwovens, or textiles exchange-traded fund (ETF) giving clean exposure to this group; index exposure is diluted, arriving through broad materials and consumer-staples funds. Reserve tickers and valuation detail for the child primers; at this level the takeaway is that meaningful, sizeable exposure to U.S. fabric-making is overwhelmingly a private-market activity, with nonwovens the lone material exception.

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5. How the money works

Despite their different technologies, all four children make money the same fundamental way — and it is neither a utility's rate base, a REIT's rents, nor a miner's cost-per-ounce. A fabric mill is a spread-times-utilization business:

• Spread. The mill buys an input (yarn for weavers and knitters; plastic resin or loose fiber for nonwovens) and sells fabric for more. Input is the biggest cost, and the revised children now converge on the same number from three directions: raw materials are roughly 60–70% of cost in nonwovens, ~60–70% of Culp's mattress-fabric production cost in broadwoven, and ~60–70% of production cost in knit.[2][4][5] It tracks commodities — cotton is weather-driven, synthetics (polyester, nylon, polypropylene, spandex, resin) are oil-linked, and yarn makers state they do not hedge, so the exposure passes straight through the chain.[3] Because input is largely a pass-through, the durable margin comes from product mix, not from the commodity spread.
• Utilization. The machines — looms, needle looms, braiders, warp-knitting frames, spunbond/meltblown lines, dyeing and finishing ranges — are expensive and mostly a fixed cost (depreciation, energy, 24/7 staffing). A single modern nonwovens line runs roughly $30–50 million, and INDA notes whole projects can range from a few million to more than $500 million.[4] Profit therefore hinges on running near full: this is a business of operating leverage, where small swings in volume or price move margins a lot and idle capacity is the enemy.[2][4]
• Mix is the strategy. In every child, commodity yardage earns thin, cyclical margins while certified, engineered, specialty output earns more and is sticky — because qualifying a new supplier (a seat-belt-webbing spec, a Berry-compliant defense fabric, a medical-barrier grade, a filtration medium) is slow and costly, which locks customers in. The commodity end really is thin: commodity polypropylene hygiene fabric runs a gross margin around 25%, the listed nonwovens leader posted only an ~11% EBITDA margin in FY2025, and Culp's mattress-fabric segment managed a 7.0% gross margin in FY2025.[4][5] Buyer power is part of the reason — Magnera's top customer alone is ~14% of sales, and in hygiene the counterparties are Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, and Unicharm.[4] (EBITDA = earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, a common cash-earnings proxy.)

The one real economic divide inside the group is capital intensity: nonwovens is the most automated (highest revenue per worker, most plant-like), the weaving and knitting children are more labor- and craft-intensive — though even the smallest child is capital-heavy by textile standards, with narrow-fabric payroll running about 24% of receipts.[3] Analyze any of them like a capacity-utilization manufacturer, watching input costs, loom/line-hours, energy, and mix — not like a regulated or income vehicle.

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6. Demand drivers

Because the four children serve different end markets, the group's demand is a bundle of partly independent drivers — which is part of why the survivors are resilient (a weak apparel year need not sink the defense or medical lines):

• Hygiene, medical, and filtration (nonwovens' engines). Diapers and feminine care (~32% of nonwoven demand), the aging-population tailwind of adult incontinence, wipes, surgical gowns and masks (plus PPE-reshoring policy), and the bright secular pocket of air and liquid filtration (cleanrooms, data centers, indoor air quality). These are the closest thing the group has to non-discretionary growth. Note the mix is shifting: in 2022 durable end uses were already 51% of North American nonwovens production by tonnes against 49% disposable, and INDA reports recent line additions skewing further toward longer-life applications.[4]
• Automotive safety. Seat-belt webbing, airbag tethers and fabric, and interior components — rising with safety content per vehicle (narrow, broadwoven, nonwoven, and knit all supply pieces).[3][4][5]
• Apparel and athleisure. Jeans, workwear, uniforms (broadwoven); T-shirts, swimwear, activewear (knit); waistbands, bra straps, and stretch (narrow) — the most cyclical, most import-exposed driver, though the shift to stretch is structural, with elastic-bearing product now around half of apparel sales.[2][3][5]
• Medical elastics and devices. Compression garments, elastic bandages, braces, and surgical tape, where suppliers project 20%+ growth in medical-grade elastic tape usage by 2030.[3]
• Construction and infrastructure. House wrap, roofing mats, and geotextiles (nonwovens) leveraged to housing starts and federal infrastructure spending.[4]
• Defense and industrial technical. Berry-compliant military textiles, parachutes, harnesses, lifting slings, protective and filtration fabric — steady, domestic-only demand that provides a floor. For scale on that floor, Department of Defense procurement of textile and apparel articles ran $2.3 billion in fiscal 2021, against a group that ships $13.6 billion in total.[3]
• Trade policy and traceability (the shared macro driver). Tariffs, the 2025 closure of the "de minimis" small-parcel import loophole — effective August 29, 2025, ending an exemption that admitted more than 1.36 billion low-cost parcels duty-free in 2024 — forced-labor import bans, and reshoring together create domestic-fabric demand across all four children for the first time in a generation.[2][5]

Two demand headwinds belong in the same list. Falling U.S. birth rates weigh on diaper volumes — the final 2024 total fertility rate was a record-low 1,599.5 births per 1,000 women — and, within the group, knitted mattress fabric continues to displace woven ticking.[2][4] The mature children grow in the low single digits; nonwovens grows in the low-to-mid single digits and carries most of the group's growth.

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7. Regulation

Fabric is lightly regulated as a material but heavily governed through its end uses and through trade — and trade/procurement rules are, in several of these children, what create domestic demand at all. The levers that matter across the group:

• Trade and procurement (the decisive lever). The Berry Amendment (10 U.S.C. 4862) requires 100% U.S.-made textiles for the Department of Defense — a direct demand floor for the specialty/defense positions in all four children, and a live risk: Defense Logistics Agency staff floated major changes to it in 2025.[3] Yarn-forward rules of origin in the USMCA (U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement) and CAFTA-DR steer North American brands toward regional fabric, and USMCA's textile rules specifically require qualifying narrow elastic fabric used in apparel to originate in the region.[3][5] Section 301 China tariffs, the de minimis repeal (effective August 29, 2025), and UFLPA (Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act) forced-labor enforcement all favor domestic producers.[2][3][5] The National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO) is the industry's advocacy voice.
• End-use safety standards. Automotive seat-belt and flammability standards (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's FMVSS 209 for seat-belt assemblies and FMVSS 302, which caps interior-material burn rate at 102 millimeters per minute, plus each automaker's production-part approval process); medical devices built from fabric are Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Class II, and N95 respirators need National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) certification; consumer flammability rules (Consumer Product Safety Commission, 16 CFR 1610); geotextile transportation specs (AASHTO M288); and OSHA/ANSI fall-protection standards.[3][4][5] In wipes, the WIPPES Act national "Do Not Flush" labeling standard is at or near enactment as of mid-2026, on top of INDA's GD4 flushability guidelines.[4]
• Environmental and worker safety at the mill — now the clearest shared exposure. The EPA's Textile Mills Effluent Guidelines (40 CFR Part 410) govern dyeing and finishing wastewater and are cited by all four children — the rule explicitly covers nonwoven textile products as well as woven and knit — and the EPA is separately collecting information on PFAS ("forever chemicals") discharges from textile mills, which makes performance finishes a regulatory and potential remediation liability group-wide.[2][3][4][5] Add OSHA's cotton-dust standard (29 CFR 1910.1043), which still applies to cotton slashing and weaving, plus Clean Air Act permitting and rising pressure on microplastics and single-use plastics that bears especially on disposable nonwovens.[2][3][4]

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8. Consolidation

By the federal concentration math, U.S. Fabric Mills is a fragmented, unconcentrated industry group. For 2022 the top 4 firms held 17.6% of receipts, the top 8 27.8%, the top 20 45.9%, and the top 50 66.5%, with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI, a standard antitrust gauge that sums the squared market shares of all firms; below 1,500 is "unconcentrated") of just 151.3.[1]

But read that number with care — it overstates how competitive-looking the real markets are. The group's HHI (151.3) is lower than any of its children's — 322.8 in nonwovens, 385 in narrow, 441.9 in broadwoven, 494 in knit — and its top-4 share (17.6%) is below every child's: 26.5% (nonwoven), 30.8% (narrow), 34% (broadwoven), 37.5% (knit).[2][3][4][5] That is a statistical artifact, not a finding: the group pools four product markets whose firms mostly do not compete with one another, so combining them dilutes measured concentration. The economically meaningful concentration lives within each child, where it is still modest — even the most concentrated child (knit, HHI 494) sits well under the "moderately concentrated" line. One further caution when reading the deep ratios: knit's top-50 share of 95.7% and narrow's 88.8% look dramatic but simply reflect tiny firm populations (97 and 154 firms respectively), not dominance.[3][5] The honest reading: fabric-making is genuinely fragmented and un-monopolized at every level, but do not treat the group HHI of 151.3 as the "true" competitive concentration for any actual market.

The direction of consolidation differs sharply by child:

• Nonwovens is consolidating around scale. The landmark events: Berry Global spun its nonwovens and films business into a November 2024 merger with Glatfelter to create Magnera (instantly the world's largest producer), and Amcor acquired the rest of Berry Global for ~$10.4 billion in April 2025; in Europe, Ahlstrom-Munksjö went private under Bain Capital, and Lydall-Unifrax formed Alkegen. The specialty end stays fragmented, and the merchant field remains only moderately concentrated even after all of it.[4]
• The three legacy children consolidate slowly, by attrition and roll-up. Weak commodity mills exit — the U.S. is now "down to its last ~100 cotton mills" — while survivors scale up, roll up heritage brands under private equity, or specialize into defensible technical niches.[2] A recurring driver is succession: aging family owners with no heir and costly machines to replace, which feeds tuck-in acquisitions (Beverly Knits' purchase of Gentry Mills and formation of Creative Dyeing & Finishing; Apex Mills' acquisition of a 240,000-square-foot former Hanesbrands plant; Finland's Inka Oy buying Manilla Oy in 2025 to broaden a webbing-and-rope line), with buyers prizing certified automotive, defense, and medical positions.[3][5]
• A newer pattern: foreign strategics buying U.S. capacity. Hansae of South Korea acquired the circular knitter Texollini in 2024, and Artistic Milliners of Pakistan agreed to take a majority stake in Cone Denim from Elevate Textiles, expected to close in Q1 2026 — evidence that offshore producers now value a U.S. footprint enough to pay for one, which is itself a read on the trade backdrop.[2][5]

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9. Risks

The group's risks are the union of its children's, and they cluster into a few themes:

• Structural import competition and price deflation. The dominant, secular risk for the three legacy children — cheaper imported woven, knit, and narrow fabric caps domestic pricing on anything commodity-grade, and imported finished apparel may do more damage than imported fabric, because a foreign-sewn garment removes the domestic cut-and-sew customer who would have bought U.S. cloth at all.[5] In nonwovens the analog is overcapacity, exemplified by the post-COVID meltblown glut (global volume fell from a ~368,000-tonne 2020 peak to ~254,000 tonnes by 2023) and low-cost Chinese capacity.[2][4]
• Input-cost and spread volatility. Cotton (crop/weather) and oil-linked synthetics (polyester, nylon, polypropylene, spandex, resin) move margins directly at 60–70% of cost; nonwovens faces spread compression when resin outruns lagging pass-through clauses, and in life-safety narrow fabrics there is availability and requalification risk in specialty fibers such as aramid and UHMWPE.[3][4]
• End-market cyclicality and substitution. Housing, furniture, autos, apparel, and construction all swing orders quickly; a demographic headwind (a record-low 2024 fertility rate) specifically threatens diaper volumes; and within the group, knits displace woven ticking while nonwovens, films, and molded parts encroach on knit and woven applications.[2][4][5]
• Policy reversal — the tailwind is political. The 2025 trade shifts that now favor domestic fabric are policy-made and could unwind; a weakened Berry Amendment, of the kind DLA staff proposed in 2025, would erode the domestic defense edge across every child.[3][5]
• Customer concentration and insourcing. Dependence on a single automaker or defense program (narrow), a large bedding or apparel program (knit), or on hygiene buyers who can insource (nonwovens) caps supplier power — Magnera's top ten customers alone are ~42% of sales.[3][4][5]
• Capital intensity and stranded assets. High fixed costs make a lost anchor customer quickly unprofitable — the classic capital trap that led Berkshire Hathaway, once a New England broadwoven weaver, to exit textiles entirely; merger-heavy nonwoven balance sheets add leverage risk (Magnera posted a net loss in FY2025).[2][4]
• Labor and safety. A newly explicit, cross-child risk: experienced loom setters, weaving and knitting mechanics, dye-house personnel, and textile engineers are aging out and hard to replace, and specialized nonwovens operators likewise; the work is industrial, with BLS recording a 2.2-per-100-full-time-worker injury and illness rate in nonwoven fabric mills in 2024.[3][4][5]
• Environmental cost and remediation. Wastewater permitting under 40 CFR Part 410 is an ongoing burden, and the EPA's PFAS work exposes mills that use performance finishes to potential future action.[2][3][4][5]
• Secular niche decline. Schiffli machine embroidery/lace within narrow fabrics has faded for decades — 357 firms and ~6,000 workers in 1977 to well under 2,000 workers by 2000 — a reminder that "specialty" is not automatically durable.[3]

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10. How to invest & outlook

How to invest. For all but nonwovens, public routes are thin and imperfect, so match the route to the child:

• The one clean public bet is in nonwovens: Magnera (NYSE: MAGN) — a leveraged, cyclical, small-cap turnaround levered to nonwoven spreads and utilization — supplemented by diluted exposure through diversified names (Mativ, DuPont, Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble, Amcor, Owens Corning, Berkshire Hathaway) and international listings (Indorama/Avgol, Toray, Suominen).[4]
• Broadwoven and knit offer only edge-case proxies — the micro-cap Culp (which straddles both, through woven and knitted mattress fabrics), an adjacent industrial weaver (Albany International, NYSE: AIN), and an upstream yarn name (Unifi, NYSE: UFI) — with the real assets private.[2][5]
• Narrow has no U.S. pure-play at all; foreign listings (Best Pacific, HKEX: 2111; Taiwan Paiho, TWSE: 9938), upstream suppliers (Unifi; Avient, NYSE: AVNT), or a downstream buyer (Autoliv, NYSE: ALV) are the closest listed economics.[3]
• The core of the whole group is a private-market activity: direct or PE ownership of the private majors (Milliken, Glen Raven, Elevate, Mount Vernon) and of profitable, cash-generative specialty mills with certified automotive, defense, and medical positions — steady free-cash-flow businesses bought at manufacturing multiples, not growth multiples, and prized for the switching-cost moats that certification creates. The decisive question in diligence is not which technology a mill uses but what share of its revenue is qualified program work versus commodity yardage.[3] There is no fabric-mills, nonwovens, or textiles ETF for clean index exposure.

Outlook. The group's trajectory is really two stories running at once. Nonwovens — the majority of the money — should deliver low-single-digit U.S. volume and mid-single-digit global value growth against a market estimated near $44 billion, with the brightest pockets in adult incontinence, filtration, medical/PPE reshoring, and infrastructure geotextiles, and with new North American capacity tilting toward longer-life durable applications rather than disposables; the drags are resin-spread swings, overcapacity, buyer power, and sustainability/regulatory pressure on single-use plastics.[4] The three legacy children — broadwoven, knit, and narrow — face a stabilizing-to-modestly-improving base case rather than a growth one: the 2025 trade backdrop (higher tariffs, the de minimis loophole closed as of August 29, forced-labor enforcement, and a potentially tighter USMCA) is the most favorable in years, steady Berry-Amendment defense demand provides a floor, and there is now hard evidence that differentiated operators see investable opportunity — Glen Raven's announced $250 million expansion program targets more than 30% additional production capability and more than 400 jobs.[2] The durable strategic direction is up-market into technical, performance, protective, medical, and automotive fabric — against persistent import competition, input-cost sensitivity, an aging skilled workforce, and political contingency.[2][3][5]

Bottom line. U.S. Fabric Mills is a ~$13.6 billion, ~40,000-worker, 651-firm group that is really one growth business (nonwovens, ~57% and rising) plus three mature specialty survivors (broadwoven, knit, narrow) that have already shed most of what they once were. Public-market access barely exists outside nonwovens; the rest is a private-market and specialty-operator story where the returns cluster in certified, defensible niches. For company-level detail on any child, read its primer: NAICS 31321 (Broadwoven), 31322 (Narrow & Schiffli), 31323 (Nonwoven), and 31324 (Knit) — each of which passes through to a single six-digit industry (313210, 313220, 313230, 313240).

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Sources

This rollup is synthesized from the four child primers and from our ingested ground-truth federal statistics for NAICS 3132. Each child primer carries its own underlying sources (U.S. Census definitions and data; BLS series; company filings and profiles; trade-rule, regulatory, and market-research references), listed there in full.

1. Histometrics ingested ground-truth federal statistics, NAICS 3132 (Fabric Mills): receipts ~$13.60B, firms 651, HHI 151.3, CR4 17.6% / CR8 27.8% / CR20 45.9% / CR50 66.5% (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration); establishments 736, employees 40,117, annual payroll ~$2.18B, first-quarter payroll ~$565M (U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns, 2023). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html; https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
2. NAICS 31321 primer (Histometrics), "Broadwoven Fabric Mills (U.S., NAICS 31321): An Investor's Primer" — receipts ~$3.63B, 228 firms, 234 establishments, 13,276 employees (Census CBP 2023) versus 18,412 (BLS 2024), payroll ~$639.8M, average pay ~$48K, ~57 employees per mill; CR4 34% / CR8 45.9% / CR20 70.6% / CR50 88.6%, HHI 441.9; employment −84.8% from 120,867 (2000) to 18,412 (2024), and the 2002 benchmark of 758 establishments / 80,530 employees / $11.4B shipments; U.S. textile-mill workforce ~89,000 (2024) and textile-and-apparel supply chain 453,122 employees / $60.9B shipments (2025); Culp (~$204M FY2026), Albany International machine clothing (~$708M, >80% paper-machine clothing), Unifi (~$571M FY2025); private majors Milliken, Glen Raven, Elevate/Cone Denim (majority sale to Artistic Milliners expected Q1 2026), Mount Vernon Mills (~750 employees, six facilities, 90M yards at Trion, GA); Glen Raven $250M expansion (>30% capability, >400 jobs); raw materials ~60–70% of cost; knit-for-woven mattress substitution; de minimis suspension effective Aug. 29, 2025 (1.36 billion 2024 parcels); EPA 40 CFR Part 410, OSHA 29 CFR 1910.1043; "last ~100 cotton mills." 2026.
3. NAICS 31322 primer (Histometrics), "Narrow Fabric Mills and Schiffli Machine Embroidery (U.S.)" — receipts $983.7M, 154 firms, 173 establishments, 4,926 employees, payroll $232.6M (~24% of receipts), ~$200K revenue per employee; CR4 30.8% / CR8 46.1% / CR20 69.5% / CR50 88.8%, HHI 385; private U.S. makers (Bally Ribbon, Asheboro Elastics/AEC, Murdock Webbing, Wayne Mills, OTEX), foreign-listed proxies Best Pacific (HKEX 2111, ~$538M) and Taiwan Paiho (TWSE 9938, ~US$400M), upstream Unifi and Avient (NYSE: AVNT), downstream Autoliv (NYSE: ALV, $10.8B revenue, 10.3% adjusted operating margin 2025); global webbing ~$4.2B (2023) with Asia-Pacific ~two-thirds, narrow woven fabrics ~$4.9B by 2033 (5.2% CAGR); DoD textile/apparel procurement $2.3B (FY2021); FMVSS 209 and FMVSS 302 (102 mm/min), Berry Amendment and the 2025 DLA proposal to loosen it, USMCA narrow-elastic origin rule, EPA effluent guidelines and PFAS study, OSHA cotton dust; Schiffli decline from 357 firms and ~6,000 workers (1977) to well under 2,000 (2000); Inka Oy / Manilla Oy (2025). 2026.
4. NAICS 31323 primer (Histometrics), "Nonwoven Fabric Mills (U.S.)" — receipts ~$7.70B, 182 firms, 227 establishments, 16,687 employees, payroll ~$1.07B, ~$460K revenue per worker; CR4 26.5% / CR8 42.3% / CR20 66% / CR50 87.1%, HHI 322.8; Magnera (NYSE: MAGN, ~$3.2B FY2025 revenue, ~11% EBITDA margin, FY2025 net loss, top customer ~14% and top ten ~42% of sales); Mativ (MATV), DuPont, Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble, Amcor, Owens Corning, Johns Manville (~$725M nonwovens sales 2024), Indorama/Avgol, Toray, Suominen; private/PE (Freudenberg, Fitesa, Ahlstrom, Alkegen, Hollingsworth & Vose); Berry Global/Glatfelter merger (Nov. 2024) and Amcor–Berry (~$10.4B, Apr. 2025); INDA North American capacity ~5.73M tonnes in 2024 with the U.S. ~88%, 2022 net imports 305,200 tonnes (6.5% of regional production), durables 51% / disposables 49% of 2022 NA production, line capex ~$30–50M; hygiene ~32% of demand; global market ~$44B; commodity PP gross margin ~25%; meltblown volume ~368,000 tonnes (2020) to ~254,000 (2023); 2024 total fertility rate 1,599.5 per 1,000 women; FDA/NIOSH, INDA GD4 and the WIPPES Act, EPA effluent guidelines and PFAS, BLS 2024 injury rate 2.2 per 100 full-time workers. 2026.
5. NAICS 31324 primer (Histometrics), "Knit Fabric Mills (U.S.)" — receipts $1.29B, 97 firms, 102 establishments, 5,228 employees, payroll $243.2M, ~$47K average pay, ~$13M receipts per firm; CR4 37.5% / CR8 54.6% / CR20 77.1% / CR50 95.7%, HHI 494; 2012 benchmark of 178 companies and 7,474 employees (~30% contraction over a decade); Culp (listed there as NASDAQ: CULP; mattress-fabric segment ~$114M FY2025 at 7.0% gross margin) and Unifi (NYSE: UFI) as the only listed proxies; private mills Beverly Knits (and Gentry Mills / Creative Dyeing & Finishing), Contempora Fabrics, Gehring Textiles, Apex Mills (former Hanesbrands facility), Texollini (Hansae, 2024), Milliken/Polartec; raw materials ~60–70% of production cost; imports and imported finished apparel as the dominant risk; Berry Amendment, USMCA and CAFTA-DR yarn-forward, Section 301, de minimis closure, UFLPA, CPSC 16 CFR 1610, EPA 40 CFR Part 410 and PFAS study, NCTO. 2026.