Knit Fabric Mills (United States) — Industry Primer

NAICS 2022 code 31324. A Histometrics rollup primer for public-market and private investors.

Short page — single-child pass-through. This is a NAICS industry (5-digit) that contains exactly one child industry, 313240 Knit Fabric Mills. At this level the two codes describe the same set of mills, so this page is deliberately brief: it explains why the level equals its one child, gives this level's own ground-truth federal figures, and points you to the child primer for the full detail.

For the complete analysis — technology, the investable universe, how the money works, regulation, consolidation, risks, and how to invest — read the child primer: NAICS 313240 Knit Fabric Mills.

---

1. Overview

Knit fabric mills take yarn and loop it into fabric — the stretchy, comfortable cloth in T-shirts, athletic wear, swimwear, underwear, mattress covers, medical bandages, and car-seat upholstery. Knit cloth is made by interlocking loops (which is why it stretches), unlike woven cloth such as a dress shirt or denim. This industry covers the mills that knit that fabric — and often also dye and finish it — but not the factories that sew it into clothing.[1]

For an investor, this is a small, mature, consolidating slice of U.S. manufacturing. The domestic mill base is a specialty survivor: having largely lost commodity apparel cloth to imports, the mills that remain compete on technical and specialty fabrics (defense, medical, automotive, industrial) where "Made in USA," speed, and quality control matter more than the lowest price. There is essentially no pure-play, publicly traded U.S. knit fabric mill; the nearest listed names are Culp, Inc. (NASDAQ: CULP), whose mattress-fabric segment includes knitted fabrics but also wovens and sewn covers, and the upstream yarn maker Unifi, Inc. (NYSE: UFI). Most meaningful exposure is a private-market proposition.[1][6][7]

---

2. What's inside — and why this level equals its one child

In the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), codes get more specific as you add digits. This page sits at the 5-digit "NAICS industry" level, code 31324. Directly beneath it is a single 6-digit "national industry":

Because there is only one child, 31324 and 313240 are effectively the same industry — same mills, same establishments, same receipts, same workforce. The U.S. did not split knitting into multiple national industries at the 6-digit level, so the 5-digit rollup adds no companies the child does not already contain. Everything true of 313240 is true here; the child primer is the authoritative write-up.[1]

What sits around this level (for orientation, not inside it): knitting yarn into finished garments is 315120 Apparel Knitting Mills; spinning fiber into yarn is 313110 Fiber, Yarn, and Thread Mills; weaving broadloom cloth is 313210 Broadwoven Fabric Mills; and standalone dyeing/finishing of purchased fabric is 313310 Textile and Fabric Finishing Mills.[1]

---

3. Size (this level's rollup figures)

Because the level equals its one child, its federal statistics are the child's statistics. These are our ground-truth figures for 31324:

That works out to roughly $47,000 average pay per worker and about $13 million in average receipts per firm — and, with 97 firms running ~102 establishments, almost every firm operates a single mill.[2][3] Employment has declined for decades as U.S. textile output moved offshore; the 2012 Economic Census recorded 178 companies and 7,474 employees, indicating a roughly 30% contraction in establishments and employment over a decade.[8]

Undercount caveat (small here). This is not an industry that federal statistics meaningfully undercount: there is no army of micro-operators or informal/individually-owned activity hiding from the surveys, and no government-run mills. (Commercial databases list more companies — ~230 — only because they sweep in adjacent or loosely tagged businesses; the federal "primarily engaged" counts above are the authoritative baseline.) The real undercount is of the market, not the mills: Americans consume far more knit fabric than U.S. mills produce, and imports — led by China — dwarf domestic output. The $1.29 billion of domestic receipts sits inside a much larger flow of imported cloth.[4][5]

---

4. Investable universe (where value concentrates)

With one child, all the value sits in that child — there is no second national industry to weigh against it. The domestic industry is overwhelmingly private and family-owned, and there is no clean public pure-play:

• Culp, Inc. (NASDAQ: CULP) — the nearest listed exposure, but imperfect: its mattress-fabric segment (~$114M in FY2025) includes knitted and woven fabrics plus sewn covers. FY2025 segment gross margin was only 7.0%. Useful for read-throughs on domestic knitting utilization, yarn costs, and bedding demand.[6]
• Unifi, Inc. (NYSE: UFI) — an upstream yarn and recycled-fiber maker (REPREVE recycled polyester), not a knit-fabric mill. A loss-making micro-cap proxy on U.S. synthetic-fiber demand, mid-restructuring.[7]
• Private specialty mills — Beverly Knits (the largest U.S. circular-knit specialist), Contempora Fabrics (employee-owned ESOP), Gehring Textiles (warp/tricot, lace, mesh), Apex Mills (technical warp and weft knits, recently acquired a 240,000 sq ft former Hanesbrands facility), and Texollini (circular knitter acquired by South Korea's Hansae in 2024) — plus knit divisions of large private materials firms such as Milliken & Company (owner of Polartec).[9][10][11][12][13][14]

See the child primer's §4 for the full company table and scale detail.

---

5. How the money works

A knit fabric mill is a conversion (spread) business wrapped around expensive machines: owners earn the gap between what they pay for yarn and energy and what they charge for finished cloth, multiplied by how hard they keep the machines running. Raw materials represent approximately 60–70% of production costs (synthetic yarns, unfinished fabric, dyes, chemicals).[6] Because yarn is largely a pass-through cost, mills protect margin by adding value — dyeing, finishing, printing, specialty construction — rather than selling plain undyed ("greige") cloth. The core levers are capacity utilization (idle machines destroy margin), energy intensity (textiles are fuel- and electricity-hungry), product mix (technical/defense fabric earns stickier premiums than commodity jersey), and quick-turn, near-shore service that justifies a price premium over an ocean container from Asia. Full detail — including live cautionary examples (Culp's 7.0% segment margin, Unifi's revenue decline and restructuring) — is in the child primer's §5.[6][7][15]

---

6. Demand drivers

The same drivers apply as at the child level: apparel and athleisure cycles (knit fabric ultimately becomes clothing); end-market diversification into automotive interiors, medical textiles, mattresses, and military/industrial uses (often less cyclical than apparel); trade policy and relative import prices (tariffs, currency, and shipping costs swing demand toward or away from domestic mills); reshoring / "Made in USA" and supply-chain resilience; government procurement (defense buyers required to buy U.S.-made textiles); recycled and traceable synthetics (downstream brand demand supports U.S. yarn producers); and input and energy costs.[5][6][16]

---

7. Regulation

Knit fabric mills are lightly regulated as producers but heavily shaped by trade and procurement rules. The key items — all detailed in the child primer's §7 — are the Berry Amendment (bars the Defense Department from buying non-U.S.-origin textiles, a direct demand floor for the technical/defense niche); the USMCA yarn-forward rule of origin (steers North American brands toward regional fabric); CAFTA-DR yarn-forward framework (preserves Western Hemisphere demand for U.S. knitting capacity); Section 301 China tariffs and the closure of the de-minimis loophole (both favorable to domestic producers); forced-labor enforcement (UFLPA); CPSC flammability standards; and EPA Textile Mills Effluent Guidelines (40 CFR Part 410) covering dyehouse wastewater, with EPA studying textile-mill PFAS discharges. The National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO) is the industry's advocacy voice.[16][17][18][19][20][21]

---

8. Consolidation

At this single level, concentration is moderate, not monopolistic: in 2022 the top 4 firms held 37.5% of receipts, the top 8 54.6%, the top 20 77.1%, and the top 50 95.7%, with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI, a standard concentration gauge) of 494 — well below the ~1,500 threshold regulators treat as "moderately concentrated."[3] A handful of larger mills lead, with a long tail of small specialists. The real competition is imports, not each other — and imported finished apparel may be more damaging than imported fabric, since a foreign-made garment eliminates the domestic garment producer that would have purchased U.S. fabric.[5] Consolidation runs through vertical integration into finishing plus roll-ups of family mills facing succession (aging owners, no heir). Foreign acquirers are also entering (Hansae/Texollini, 2024). See the child primer's §8 for examples including Beverly Knits / Gentry Mills and Apex Mills / Hanesbrands.[10][13][14]

---

9. Risks

The risk set is identical to the child's: import competition and price deflation (the dominant, structural risk — cheaper imported fabric and especially imported finished apparel cap domestic pricing); demand cyclicality (apparel downturns hit orders fast); input and energy cost swings (polyester tracks oil, cotton tracks the crop); policy reversal (the industry's tailwinds are policy-made — a shift toward liberalization would remove props); succession and subscale operations; capital intensity / stranded assets (high fixed costs make a lost anchor customer quickly unprofitable); customer concentration (large bedding, apparel, automotive programs may represent substantial volume and purchasing leverage); labor risk (availability of knitting technicians, mechanics, dye-house personnel, and an aging trained workforce); environmental and regulatory cost (wastewater permits, EPA PFAS study); and substitution risk (woven fabrics, nonwovens, films, and molded components competing where they fit). Full treatment is in the child primer's §9.[5][6][7][15][16][21]

---

10. How to invest & outlook

Public-market routes are thin and indirect. Culp (NASDAQ: CULP) is the most direct listed exposure but imperfect — its operations include knitted and woven mattress fabrics, sewn covers, and upholstery. Unifi (NYSE: UFI) offers upstream exposure to polyester and nylon yarn but is a loss-making micro-cap mid-restructuring. There is no U.S. knit-fabric-mill ETF or pure-play basket.

Private-market routes are where the real access is: direct acquisition of family-owned specialty mills (many owners at succession age); specialty/technical roll-ups of dyeing, finishing, and technical-knit capacity (the Beverly Knits playbook); and businesses anchored to protected niches — Berry-Amendment defense, medical, automotive, and mattress demand — that enjoy stickier margins and a policy floor.

Outlook. Expect continued attrition of commodity capacity alongside selective consolidation of specialty and finishing assets. The near-term direction hinges less on fashion than on trade policy — higher tariffs on Chinese textiles, the closed de-minimis loophole, forced-labor enforcement, and a potentially tighter USMCA are, on balance, leaning the domestic industry's way, against headwinds of soft apparel demand and structurally cheaper imports.[5][6][7][16]

Bottom line. Because 31324 has a single child, this level is Knit Fabric Mills — about $1.3 billion and ~100 mills, a small, mature, policy-sensitive niche that survives on specialty, technical, and defense fabrics. For the full analysis, read the child primer: NAICS 313240.[3][17]

---

Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. "NAICS 313240 — Knit Fabric Mills (definition)." 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=313240&year=2022
2. U.S. Census Bureau. "County Business Patterns, NAICS 313240." 2023. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
3. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 Economic Census — Concentration and receipts, NAICS 313240." 2022. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
4. IBISWorld. "NAICS Code 313240 — Knit Fabric Mills." 2025. https://www.ibisworld.com/classifications/naics/313240/knit-fabric-mills/
5. IndexBox. "United States' Knitted Fabric Market to Reach 145K Tons and $2 Billion by 2035." 2024. https://www.indexbox.io/blog/knitted-fabric-united-states-market-overview-2024-11/
6. Culp, Inc. "FY2025 Form 10-K." 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/723603/000095017025095233/culp-20250427.htm
7. Unifi, Inc. "FY2025 Form 10-K." 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/100726/000095017025111331/ufi-20250629.htm
8. U.S. Census Bureau. "2012 Economic Census, NAICS 313240." https://data.census.gov/table/ECNBASIC2012.EC1231A2?codeset=naics~N0000.00&q=ec1231
9. Apex Mills. "Comparing Warp and Weft Knitting Techniques." 2024. https://www.apexmills.com/media_post/warp-vs-weft-knitting/
10. Beverly Knits. "USA Circular Knit Technical Textile Manufacturer." 2026. https://www.beverlyknits.com/
11. Textile World. "Beverly Knits Inc. Acquires Gentry Mills; Forms Creative Dyeing & Finishing LLC." 2022. https://www.textileworld.com/textile-world/knitting-apparel/2022/10/beverly-knits-inc-acquires-gentry-mills-forms-creative-dyeing-finishing-llc/
12. Milliken & Company. "Company profile." 2025. https://www.milliken.com/
13. Apex Mills. "Press Release: Apex Mills Acquires Hanesbrands Inc. Facility in Stuart, Virginia." https://www.apexmills.com/media_post/press-release-apex-mills-acquires-hanesbrands-inc-facility-in-stuart-virginia/
14. Knitting Industry. "Hansae Acquires US Circular Knitter." 2024. https://www.knittingindustry.com/hansae-acquires-us-circular-knitter/
15. Fibre2Fashion. "Energy Costs Impact on Textile Manufacturing." https://www.fibre2fashion.com/market-intelligence/texpro-textile-and-apparel/textile-guide/11425/energy-cost-impact-textile-manufacturing
16. National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO). "USMCA rules, de minimis, and enforcement statements." 2025. https://ncto.org/
17. U.S. Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration. "The Berry Amendment." https://www.trade.gov/berry-amendment
18. Congressional Research Service. "Domestic Preference Statutes: The Berry Amendment and the Kissell Amendment." https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF13001
19. ArentFox Schiff. "New Textile and Apparel Rules for the USMCA (yarn-forward)." https://www.afslaw.com/perspectives/alerts/new-textile-and-apparel-rules-the-usmca
20. U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission / eCFR. "16 CFR Part 1610 — Standard for the Flammability of Clothing Textiles." https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-II/subchapter-D/part-1610
21. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "Textile Mills Effluent Guidelines." https://www.epa.gov/eg/textile-mills-effluent-guidelines