Textile Product Mills (U.S.) — NAICS 314

An investor's primer for public-market and private investors. Plain language. This is a rollup page one level up from the industry-group primers below: NAICS 314 is a subsector that stitches together two very different businesses — the home side (carpet, rugs, curtains, linens) and the industrial/technical side (bags, tarps, tents, rope, tire cord, batting, embroidery). The value of this page is the contrast between those two halves and the shape of the whole. For the fine detail of each, follow the child primers linked below.

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1. Overview

NAICS (North American Industry Classification System — the standard code set the U.S. government uses to group businesses) code 314 — Textile Product Mills is a three-digit "subsector" inside Manufacturing. It is the made-up textile goods part of the textile chain: firms that buy woven cloth, yarn, or fiber from someone else and cut, sew, twist, or convert it into a finished, non-apparel product [1][5].

It helps to place 314 among its neighbors. American textiles split into three subsectors: 313 Textile Mills spin yarn and weave or knit the cloth; 315 Apparel turns cloth into clothing; and 314 Textile Product Mills — this page — turns cloth into everything else you can make from a textile that you don't wear: floor coverings, window and bed furnishings, sacks and tarps, tents and awnings, rope and tire reinforcement, batting and felt. If it is a finished textile object and it is not a shirt, it is probably made in 314.

For an investor, the subsector is best understood as two industry groups under one label that share a manufacturing method but almost no end market. Both halves are "converter" businesses that earn a thin spread between input cost and finished-goods price; both are mature, largely private, and squeezed by imports on anything commoditized. But one half sells to households (and is shrinking, though at a rate its own industry now argues about), while the other sells to industry, agriculture, defense, and vehicles (and is small but durable, with real growth pockets). Combined, the subsector ships about $23.1 billion a year and employs roughly 96,700 people across ~4,997 plants [3][4].

The whole subsector is small, fragmented, and overwhelmingly private or foreign-owned. Public U.S. exposure to it is thin and indirect — and, as the child primers now document, the handful of listed windows into it are diversified companies where the in-code business is a minor line, a foreign subsidiary, or in one case a micro-cap flagging going-concern doubt [6][7]. That, plus the split personality of its two halves, is what this page is for.

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

The NAICS hierarchy narrows as codes get longer: sector 31–33 (Manufacturing) → subsector 314 (Textile Product Mills) → two four-digit "industry groups" below. Those two children are:

• 3141 — Textile Furnishings Mills — the home half: carpet and rug mills (31411) plus curtain and linen mills (31412) [1].
• 3149 — Other Textile Product Mills — the industrial/technical half: textile bag and canvas mills (31491) plus a genuine grab-bag (31499) of rope, cordage, twine, tire cord, batting, felt, sleeping bags, nets, parachutes, technical textiles, and contract embroidery [5].

They look alike on the label — both are "textile product mills" — and diverge on almost everything that matters to an owner. The table below is the heart of this page.

Read the table this way. The two halves are almost the same size by revenue — a near-even 55/45 split — but they get there completely differently. The home half (3141) earns its 55% from fewer, larger, more capital-intensive plants (a carpet mill runs big tufting and dyeing lines), so it has a quarter of the firms but produces ~$293k per worker. The industrial half (3149) has three-quarters of the firms and more than half the workers, but each is a small cut-and-sew shop, so it produces only ~$195k per worker and adds up to just 45% of the dollars. The average firm in the home half is roughly four times larger than the average firm in the industrial half.

The more important contrast is who they sell to and where they're headed. The home half is a consumer business in decline — carpet is losing share to luxury vinyl tile (LVT), laminate, and wood, and American linen production has largely moved offshore to India and China, where a single Indian supplier, Welspun, is reckoned to account for roughly 45% of U.S. towel imports and 59% of U.S. sheet imports [6]. What the revised child primer adds is that the carpet half of that story is genuinely disputed: estimates put carpet at 39–44% of the U.S. flooring market by area in 2024, with industry sources arguing the slide is flattening toward an equilibrium while Berkshire Hathaway's 2025 shareholder report treats the consumer move away from soft surface as an ongoing fact its own mill (Shaw) has had to adapt to [6]. Do not treat carpet's trajectory as settled.

The industrial half is a diversified industrial business — no single end market, spread across farms, job sites, truck fleets, marinas, offshore energy, the military, and (its biggest growth story) tire reinforcement — and while its commodity lines are flat and import-pressured, it has real tailwinds in specialty rope, tire cord, and reusable totes [7]. Put simply: 3141 is the bigger, older, shrinking half; 3149 is the smaller, scrappier, steadier half. Full detail lives in the 3141 primer and the 3149 primer.

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3. How big it is — this subsector's rollup figures

These are the subsector's own federal ground-truth figures, and they tie out almost exactly as the sum of the two children — confirming 314 has no hidden third activity.

The children sum cleanly to the subsector on every physical measure: receipts $12.67B + $10.41B = $23.08B; employment 43,233 + 53,450 = 96,683; establishments 1,296 + 3,701 = 4,997; annual payroll $2.09B + $2.50B = $4.59B; first-quarter payroll $527.7M + $610.7M = $1.138B [6][7]. (Firm counts sum to 4,740 against the reported 4,734 — a six-firm gap from Census disclosure rounding, immaterial.) The blend works out to roughly $4.9 million of revenue per firm and about $47,500 of average pay per worker — both averages of two different distributions that describe no actual company.

How to read the concentration numbers. CR4 is the share of shipments made by the four largest firms (CR8/CR20/CR50 extend that to the top 8/20/50). The HHI (Herfindahl-Hirschman Index) is a 0–10,000 scale that squares each firm's market share and adds them up; U.S. antitrust agencies treat anything below ~1,500 as "unconcentrated." At ~262, NAICS 314 is one of the least concentrated corners of U.S. manufacturing — no firm comes close to dominating.

But that subsector-level figure is misleading if you stop there, and it is the single most important caveat on this page. The ~262 blends two markets that don't compete: the home half runs CR4 41.8% and an HHI of ~616 (unconcentrated overall, but with carpet moderately concentrated at CR4 56.7% / HHI ~1,111 — effectively a Big Three-to-Four), while the industrial half runs CR4 12.7% and an HHI of ~71 [6][7]. The aggregate ~262 describes neither real market.

The revised 3149 primer makes the mechanism explicit, and it is worth carrying up: rolling up non-competing product markets pushes measured concentration down, not toward an average. 3149's own group HHI of 71.1 is lower than either of its children (31491 at ~87.5, 31499 at 155), which is arithmetic, not a finding [7]. The same dilution operates one level higher here. Where the real concentration sits is inside the pockets: carpet on the home side, and on the industrial side a single node — 314994, rope/cordage/twine/tire cord — with CR4 near 39%, HHI near 607, roughly $1.9 billion of shipments and just 106 firms, sitting inside a subsector of 4,734 firms [7]. Always analyze the children, and their pockets, separately.

Undercount caveat. The federal counts measure U.S. employer plants, and 314 is under-reported at both ends.

• The tiny-operator tail. Custom-drapery and workroom activity (in 3141) and a great deal of awning, canvas, cover, and — especially — home-based embroidery and monogramming work (in 3149) is done by one- and two-person shops that file as nonemployer sole proprietors and never appear in this employer-based count. The scale of the gap is now quantifiable on the industrial side: trade trackers put commercial-embroidery shops alone above 15,000 in the U.S., against 4,734 employer firms in the entire subsector [7]. On the home side, 84.6% of linen plants have fewer than twenty employees, so the employer count is already dominated by micro-businesses before the nonemployer tail is added [6]. The true number of operators touching 314 is materially higher than 4,734.
• The import gap. For commodity goods — mass-market sheets and towels, area rugs, standard tarps, poly sacks, twine, basic fillings, low-end decoration — imports (mostly from Asia) dominate what Americans actually buy and never show up as U.S. mill shipments. The children now put numbers around this, though not on a single basis, and they do not agree: Mohawk sizes the U.S. carpet-and-rug market at ~$11.2 billion inside a $33.2 billion U.S. floor-covering market against $9.34 billion of Census carpet mill shipments [8]; on linens, the USITC counted $15.4 billion of U.S. home-furnishing textile imports in 2021 while Mordor sizes the U.S. home-textile market at roughly $25 billion a year and trade analysts put the import share on the order of 90%+ [6]; on the industrial side, the global textile-bag market is estimated near $60 billion against ~$4.36 billion of U.S. bag/canvas shipments, and the U.S. imported roughly 79,000 tons of cordage in 2024 [7]. Different years, different geographies, different product scopes — treat the direction as solid and any precise share as approximate.

So the ~$23.1 billion is a fair measure of domestic mill production, but it materially understates total U.S. spending on these goods. No part of this subsector is distorted by government ownership; it is genuinely small — simply undercounted at the small-operator end and globally sourced at the commodity end.

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4. Investable universe — where value concentrates across the children

The defining fact for a public-market investor is blunt: there is no clean U.S.-listed pure-play anywhere in NAICS 314, and no dedicated exchange-traded fund (ETF) targets it. What the revised children change is the breadth and quality of the indirect exposure — the reachable set is wider than it looked, and for the first time both halves have at least one company disclosing real operating numbers for an in-code business. Every route is still a diversified company.

In the home half (3141), value is lopsided and mostly private. In carpet — three-quarters of that child's dollars — the biggest assets are private: Shaw Industries, a wholly owned Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary (immaterial to Berkshire) that processes roughly 92% of its carpet-yarn requirements internally, and Engineered Floors, the #3 producer at roughly $1.5 billion, family-owned [6]. The listed routes are diversified or partial: Mohawk Industries (NYSE: MHK), a large-cap global flooring company (~$10.8B net sales, 2024) where carpet is one line among ceramic, laminate, and LVT [6]; Interface (NASDAQ: TILE), the closest listed near-pure-play at ~$1.39 billion of 2025 revenue, focused on commercial carpet tile [9]; and The Dixie Group (DXYN), a residential micro-cap (~$257M revenue) whose 2025 10-K carries a going-concern warning [6]. In linens, there is no large U.S.-listed home-textiles manufacturer — the closest is small-cap Crown Crafts (CRWS) (~$87M revenue), Culp (CULP) gives adjacent home-textile fabric exposure (~$213M revenue), Icahn Enterprises (IEP) wholly owns WestPoint Home as a diluted holding-company sliver, and the biggest direct pure-plays trade in India (Welspun Living, Trident, Indo Count) [6].

In the industrial half (3149), the map has been redrawn and one long-standing parent claim needs correcting. The bag/canvas end is not cleanly reachable through industrial packaging: Greif (GEF) largely exited flexible bulk bags in 2022, Sonoco (SON) holds only a small bulk-bag joint venture, and Amcor (AMCR)'s relevant products are mostly plastic film in an adjacent code [7]. A better route is marine-and-RV components: Patrick Industries (NASDAQ: PATK) owns Tumacs Covers (custom boat covers and bimini tops) and LCI Industries (NYSE: LCII) sells awnings and marine covers inside much larger segments [7]. On the rope/tire-cord side, the concentrated pocket remains entirely foreign-listed: Kordsa (Borsa Istanbul), Hyosung Advanced Materials and Kolon (Korea), SRF (India), Bekaert (Brussels), Toray and Teijin (Tokyo), plus Bridgestone (Tokyo), which owns captive Firestone Fibers [7]. Newly added: Aimia (TSX: AIM) owns Cortland International, the first disclosed public option on the rope side; Avient (NYSE: AVNT) owns the Dyneema high-modulus fiber business upstream; and TransDigm (NYSE: TDG) owns Airborne Systems, a genuine in-code parachute business whose sales are not separately disclosed [7][10].

Where the domestic value actually lives (private): large carpet mills, area-rug importers, and the surviving U.S. towel mills — 1888 Mills runs the largest, in Griffin, Georgia (home half) [6]; family awning/canvas/cover shops, flexible-bulk-bag and Berry-compliant defense-textile platforms, engineered-rope and specialty-cordage mills (Samson, Cortland, WireCo, Yale, Teufelberger/New England Ropes), batting/fiberfill converters, flag and sleeping-bag makers, and thousands of independent embroidery shops (industrial half) [7]. The takeaway across both children: to own NAICS 314 through public markets you buy a diversified flooring, packaging, RV-components, or aerospace stock, an adjacent fabric name, a micro-cap, or a foreign tire-cord maker — never the subsector itself. Note the scale mismatch that makes the point: Mohawk alone books more revenue globally than the entire U.S. carpet industry ships domestically [6][8]. To own the American business, you almost have to do it privately. Full company tables are in the 3141 and 3149 primers.

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5. How the money works

Both children are converter / spread manufacturers, so the right lens across the whole subsector is manufacturing economics — not retail markups, utility rate base, or real-estate metrics. Owners earn on the gap between the price of the finished good and the cost of inputs (purchased fiber/fabric + labor + machine overhead + freight), run through a plant whose fixed costs must be covered by throughput. Four levers govern the money, and they apply to both halves:

• Input-cost pass-through is the master variable. Petroleum-linked synthetics — polyester, nylon, polypropylene — dominate the cost sheet on both sides (carpet fiber and backing; tarps, rope, and tire cord), with cotton layered in for linens and batting, steel wire for tire cord, and PVC for tarps. Because those synthetics are oil-and-gas derivatives, input cost tracks energy prices; U.S. polyester staple fiber ran around $1.50/kg in late 2025 [7]. Margin lives or dies on repricing fast enough when feedstock swings. Tire-cord contracts often carry raw-material adjustment clauses; commodity twine, tarps, fillings, mass-retail linens, and low-end embroidery have almost no pricing power [6][7].
• Capacity utilization and labor are the bottlenecks. Where the business is capital-heavy — carpet's tufting/dyeing lines, tire cord's extrude-twist-weave-heat-set plants — a full plant is very profitable and a half-empty one bleeds fixed cost. Where it is labor-heavy — linen cut-and-sew, canvas/awning fabrication, contract embroidery — scarce skilled sewing labor and run-rate per machine set the ceiling [6][7].
• Product mix / value-add is the escape hatch everywhere. Margin scales with engineering, fit, speed, and certification: a premium branded sheet or a made-to-measure boat cover, a Berry-compliant military order, high-modulus specialty rope, tire reinforcement spec'd into a customer's design, or an institutional (hotel/hospital) linen program all earn well above the commodity floor. Standard tarps, mass-retail linens, twine, and undifferentiated stitching sit at that floor [6][7].
• Imports set the price ceiling on the commodity end. Because low-cost imports cap pricing on anything undifferentiated, domestic survivors in both halves move up into engineered, certified, urgent, oversized, or made-in-USA product where price is not the only thing that matters. Freight is a modest natural shield for bulky, low-density goods — batting, finished covers, and rugs are expensive to ship [7].

What is new at this level: the margin evidence now lines up across both halves, and it says the same thing. The children have between them produced disclosed figures for four of the subsector's pockets, and in every case the commodity end is thin and the specified, branded, or certified end is not:

• Commodity residential flooring: Mohawk's Flooring North America segment earned roughly a 3.1% operating margin in 2025, down from 6.3% in 2024, the decline attributed to lower volume and weaker fixed-cost leverage [8].
• Commercial carpet tile: Interface earned a 38.7% gross and 11.8% operating margin in 2025 on price, mix, and fixed-cost absorption [9].
• Linens: branded and licensed Crown Crafts ran a 24.4% gross margin against 18% at private-label-heavy WestPoint Home [6].
• Engineered rope: Cortland International, under Aimia, ran C$150.4 million of 2025 revenue at a 22.4% gross margin and 13.2% adjusted EBITDA margin — the only disclosed operating benchmark anywhere in the industrial half [10].

Two cautions. Gross, operating, and EBITDA margins are not comparable to each other — read each pair on its own basis. And these are single companies, not industry averages. But the pattern is consistent across two unrelated end markets, which is about as much corroboration as a subsector this private offers. Cortland also shows the downside of the same operating leverage: Q4 2025 revenue fell 17.1% and its adjusted EBITDA margin dropped to 12.0% from 16.2%, which management attributed to tariff-related softness in marine and shipping rope and the non-recurrence of strong offshore-energy projects [10]. The shared thread across 314: this is a thin-margin, volume-and-utilization subsector with limited pricing power on commodity lines, lumpy project work at the specialized end, and decent economics only where the product is differentiated. Detail is in each child primer, Section 5.

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6. Demand drivers

The two halves run on largely independent demand engines, which is exactly why the subsector as a whole is steadier than either child alone.

• The home half (3141) rides a housing-and-consumer backbone: existing-home sales and housing turnover (carpet and linens are mostly replacement/remodel purchases), new residential construction and household formation, and consumer discretionary spending (both trade down in downturns). It adds a commercial/institutional leg — carpet tile in offices, hospitality, healthcare, and education, where it has held up best; linen supply to hotels and hospitals, which is more service-driven and more defensible [6].
• The industrial half (3149) rides a diversified industrial bundle: agriculture (bulk bags, baler twine against more than 600 million North American bales a year), construction (tarps, covers), trucking and logistics, marine and recreation (sails, boat/pool covers, tents), events and hospitality, defense (tents, packs, webbing, parachutes), furniture/mattresses/bedding (batting and fiberfill), promotional products and uniforms (embroidery), and vehicles and tire replacement — the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association projects 340.2 million U.S. tire shipments for 2025, replacement-led (up 4.4 million units) with original equipment down 1.4 million versus 2024, and heavier electric vehicles need more reinforcement [7][12]. A distinct structural driver the parent previously missed: synthetic-to-steel substitution, where high-modulus polyethylene and aramid systems can cut weight by more than 80% versus steel wire, opening mooring, offshore lifting, floating wind, and material handling [7].

The one shared swing factor is oil-linked petrochemical feedstock, which moves the cost base of both children at once. Beyond that, the demand stories barely overlap — a policy or price move that helps one half (say, a housing recovery, or a tariff that reshores linen production) does little for the other.

What the incumbents are doing about it is a useful cross-subsector signal, and none of it is a growth story for the domestic mill base — all of it is holding ground. In carpet, the response is diversification out of the category: Berkshire reports Shaw expanding into hard surfaces precisely because consumers moved there [6]. In linens, it is automation to defend domestic cost position — American Textile has announced robotics and AI-enabled production investment [6]. In the industrial half, it is moving upmarket into engineered, certified, and Berry-compliant product, with bag/canvas selling prices up 6.8% year over year to March 2026 (canvas and related products up 7.2%) — though that alone does not show whether the increases kept pace with labor and materials [7]. See each child primer, Section 6.

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7. Regulation

Nothing in NAICS 314 is licensed or rate-regulated. The rules that bite are product safety, labeling, environmental, and — above all — trade and procurement, and the emphasis differs by half:

• The home half (3141) carries an environmental stack (heaviest in carpet: California Extended Producer Responsibility recycling assessments funding the industry nonprofit CARE, which rose up to ~36% effective January 1, 2024, with further differential increases in 2025; restrictions on PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — stain treatments; indoor-air/VOC certification) plus a labeling-and-trade stack on linens (flammability rules from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, fiber-content and care labeling from the Federal Trade Commission, CPSIA testing for infant items, the 2025 suspension of the "de minimis" $800 duty-free import exemption, and Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act cotton-sourcing diligence) [6].
• The industrial half (3149) is shaped most by federal procurement and trade. The Berry Amendment (10 U.S.C. §4862) requires most U.S. Department of Defense textile purchases — tents, tarps, covers, bags, packs, webbing, naval line, sleeping bags, parachutes — to be U.S.-made from fiber onward, carving out an import-proof pocket of demand for compliant fabricators. Layered on top: antidumping/countervailing duties on upstream fiber (which protect domestic fiber but raise fabricators' costs), Section 301 tariffs on finished Chinese goods (which give domestic mills cover), and product-safety standards spanning tent and awning flammability (CPAI-84, NFPA 701), filling-disclosure "law labels" for batting and sleeping bags, and OSHA's sling rule (29 CFR 1910.184) for load-bearing cordage [7].

Two threads are now genuinely common to both halves, and this is the clearest regulatory update from the revised children.

• PFAS has become a subsector-wide obligation, not a carpet issue. It reaches the halves at different stages. Carpet's exposure is legacy and physical — Shaw and Mohawk reportedly stopped using PFAS in U.S. carpet production in 2019 but still face disputes over historical releases around Dalton, Georgia [6]. Linen's and the industrial half's are prospective and administrative — stain- and water-resistant finishes fall under California's AB 1817, which restricted new regulated-PFAS textile articles beginning January 1, 2025 [7], and under EPA's TSCA Section 8(a)(7) reporting rule, which reaches parties that manufactured or imported PFAS or PFAS-containing articles since 2011, with deadlines of October 13, 2026 for most manufacturers and April 13, 2027 for small businesses reporting solely as importers [13]. State restrictions are moving faster than federal ones. Put the PFAS calendar on both watch-lists.
• The same effluent rule reaches both. EPA's Textile Mills Effluent Guidelines (40 CFR Part 410) govern carpet-finishing wastewater on the home side and specifically identify tire-cord and fabric dipping on the industrial side, with a PFAS-related study underway that may support revised requirements [6][7].

The older common thread still holds: trade policy is the single biggest regulatory swing factor — and it is double-edged, since the same tariff can help a firm that sells finished goods while hurting one that imports fiber. Specifics and citations are in each child primer, Section 7.

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8. Consolidation

NAICS 314 is one of the most fragmented subsectors in the federal data (HHI ~262, CR4 26.7%), and the M&A that does happen is overwhelmingly private — there is essentially no domestic public-company consolidation across the subsector. But the fragmentation is not uniform, and the two halves consolidate on different logics:

• The home half (3141) has already consolidated where it counts. Carpet is a Big Three-to-Four (Shaw, Mohawk, Engineered Floors, plus Interface in commercial) clustered around Dalton, Georgia, with roughly 85% of production within ~65 miles — the consolidation happened onshore as volume shrank and weaker mills were absorbed, Beaulieu of America's 2017 bankruptcy (assets to Engineered Floors) being the template, while PE separately rolls up flooring distribution and installation [6]. Linens have barely consolidated domestically (CR4 21.1%, HHI ~192) but are highly concentrated globally among vertically integrated Asian giants, with consolidation showing up as survivor scale among the few remaining U.S. mills and as foreign acquisition of U.S. brands — Indo Count buying Wamsutta in 2024 [6]. This is why the domestic HHI reads "fragmented" while the shelf an American shopper sees does not.
• The industrial half (3149) consolidates on two tracks: its tire-cord core is a global oligopoly where scale and original-equipment-manufacturer qualification are the moats and new capacity is built in Turkey and Asia; its rope, bulk-bag, defense-textile, specialty-cover, and technical-textile niches are being rolled up by private-equity platforms as import pressure pushes survivors upmarket — Onex's WireCo, River Associates buying Yale Cordage (which then acquired Slingmax), Teufelberger acquiring New England Ropes, Samson buying European ropemakers, Audax taking a majority position in Covercraft in 2021, and Oakley Capital-backed structures consolidating sailmaking under North Sails [7]. The vast tail of awning, canvas, and embroidery shops stays fragmented — a patient private roll-up opportunity.

One disclosed price, for the first time. Deal terms in this subsector are almost never public, which makes Aimia's 2023 purchase of Cortland the only visible multiple anywhere in 314: C$26.6 million of consideration for roughly C$36.5 million of trailing revenue, about 7.2× trailing adjusted EBITDA [11]. One engineered-rope transaction is not a subsector comp, but it is a useful anchor for anyone underwriting a lower-middle-market platform here.

Net across the subsector: the acquisition action is private roll-ups and global capacity shifts, not listed-company M&A. See each child primer, Section 8.

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9. Risks

Shared across the whole subsector:

1. Import competition caps commodity pricing everywhere — mass-market linens and rugs (home half), tarps, bags, rope, twine, and fillings (industrial half) — and recent tariff escalation has not produced a domestic manufacturing rebound. U.S. textile-mill output fell in 2025 as sourcing re-routed to Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, and Mexico rather than reshoring [7][14].
2. Input-cost / oil volatility — the petroleum-linked synthetics both halves depend on can spike faster than prices reset, compressing thin margins [6][7].
3. Cyclicality and lumpy orders — the home half tracks housing and consumer confidence; the industrial half softens with furniture, marine, construction, corporate marketing, and lumpy defense and project work. Cortland's 17.1% Q4 2025 revenue decline on project non-recurrence is a live example [10].
4. Weak pricing power and thin margins on all commodity lines — visible in Mohawk's ~3.1% Flooring North America operating margin in 2025 [8].
5. Trade-policy whipsaw — the same tariff helps a finished-goods maker and hurts a firm that imports fiber, so the direction of any given policy move is ambiguous [6][7].
6. Chemical and environmental liability, rising on both sides — PFAS reformulation cost, legacy carpet remediation disputes, state textile restrictions, TSCA Section 8(a)(7) reporting by October 2026 / April 2027, and finishing-effluent exposure are growing faster than the industry's ability to price them [6][7][13].
7. Public-market thinness — the best assets are private or foreign, so listed exposure is limited, indirect, and diluted inside diversified companies; the one U.S. residential carpet micro-cap carries a going-concern warning [6].

Distinct to each half:

• Home (3141): substitution of carpet by hard-surface flooring, with genuine uncertainty over whether that share shift has stabilized or is still running (39–44% of the flooring market in 2024, depending on source) [6]; California-led environmental cost creep (CARE assessments up ~36% in 2024); customer concentration among a few mega-retailers on the linen side — two customers were 66% of Crown Crafts' fiscal-2025 gross sales [6]; UFLPA sourcing compliance and currency competition from Asian majors.
• Industrial (3149): scarce and aging skilled sewing labor; capital-intensive tire-cord plants that empty fast in a downturn and sell to a handful of tire OEMs, where losing a qualification is material; substitution risk in both directions (rigid containers and plastic film for textile bags; steel/polyester/nylon/aramid shifts that can strand tire-cord capacity); very low entry barriers — and thus fragile balance sheets and key-person risk — in commodity fabrication and embroidery; and product liability on shelters, awnings, hazardous-material bags, ropes, slings, parachutes, and fire hose, where failure consequences are large relative to the size of the firms making them [7].

Full discussion in each child primer, Section 9.

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10. How to invest & outlook

Routes — public (narrow, indirect, split by child). There is no U.S. pure-play and no dedicated ETF for NAICS 314.

• Home-half exposure: Mohawk (MHK) for diversified large-cap flooring, Interface (TILE) as the closest commercial carpet-tile pure-play and the better-margin business of the two [9], Dixie (DXYN) as a speculative micro-cap now carrying a going-concern warning; Crown Crafts (CRWS) and Culp (CULP) for thin and adjacent home-textile exposure, Icahn Enterprises (IEP) for diluted WestPoint Home exposure, and Berkshire (BRK.A/BRK.B), which owns Shaw but immaterially; the Indian majors (Welspun Living, Trident, Indo Count) via international brokerage for direct linen exposure [6].
• Industrial-half exposure: marine and RV components (Patrick Industries PATK, LCI Industries LCII) for the cover/awning end, and diversified industrial packaging (Greif GEF, Sonoco SON, Amcor AMCR) with the caveat that Greif largely exited flexible bulk bags in 2022 and Amcor's relevant products sit in an adjacent code; foreign-listed tire-reinforcement makers (Kordsa, Hyosung, Kolon, SRF, Bekaert, Toray, Teijin) or the tire majors (Goodyear, Michelin, Continental) for the demand pull; Aimia (TSX: AIM) for Cortland rope, Avient (AVNT) for Dyneema fiber upstream, and TransDigm (TDG) for undisclosed Airborne Systems parachute exposure [7][10]. Every one of these is a diversified company, not a clean bet on the code.

Routes — private (where most of the American money is actually made). For the home half: direct carpet-mill ownership, area-rug importing/distribution, flooring distribution and installation roll-ups, custom-drapery workrooms, hospitality/healthcare linen supply, and premium direct-to-consumer bedding brands. For the industrial half: buy-and-build of canvas/awning/cover shops, flexible-bulk-bag and Berry-compliant defense-textile platforms, engineered-rope and technical-textile converters (spec'd-in, certification-gated products with defense, marine, and energy exposure), and embroidery/decoration roll-ups — much of it at lower-middle-market, search-fund, or Small Business Administration-loan scale, which nearly every firm in the subsector qualifies for given SBA size standards of 500–550 employees against roughly 14 employees per establishment [7].

Outlook. Treat NAICS 314 as two mature, import-pressured, largely private manufacturing bases that will not re-accelerate as a whole — returns come from cost position, product mix, certification, and cycle timing, not from subsector growth. The home half is the larger, older, shrinking side whose swing factors are housing turnover, mortgage rates, oil-linked fiber costs, the 2025–26 tariff and de-minimis regime on linens, and — the live question — whether carpet's hard-surface share loss really has flattened [6]. The industrial half is the smaller, scrappier, more durable side whose flat commodity lines are offset by genuine growth pockets: specialty rope (offshore wind, aquaculture, naval, and synthetics displacing steel), tire cord (a replacement-led market projected at 340.2 million U.S. shipments for 2025, plus heavier EVs) [12], technical/defense/medical/recycled textiles, and reusable totes riding plastic-bag policy [7]. Across both, the healthier pockets are the premium, branded, engineered, certified, commercial, and institutional niches — and the disclosed margins on both sides now say so directly, from Interface's 11.8% operating margin in commercial carpet tile to Cortland's 13.2% adjusted EBITDA margin in engineered rope against ~3.1% in commodity residential flooring [8][9][10]. Add the PFAS calendar to both watch-lists. Bottom line: 314 is a small, fragmented subsector that is largely a footnote for public-market investors but a legitimate, cash-generative field for private operators who specialize, certify, and consolidate — a place to own or operate a business, not to buy a ticker. For the complete picture of each half, read the 3141 Textile Furnishings Mills and 3149 Other Textile Product Mills primers.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Definitions — 314 Textile Product Mills, 3141 Textile Furnishings Mills, 3149 Other Textile Product Mills. https://www.census.gov/naics/
2. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS structure — Subsector 314 within Manufacturing (313 Textile Mills, 314 Textile Product Mills, 315 Apparel Manufacturing). https://www.census.gov/naics/
3. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration Ratios / Summary Statistics, NAICS 314 (receipts ~$23.08B; firms 4,734; CR4 26.7%, CR8 32.5%, CR20 42.5%, CR50 54.7%; HHI 262.3), via Histometrics ingested federal statistics. https://data.census.gov/
4. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 314 (establishments 4,997; employment 96,683; annual payroll ~$4.591B; Q1 payroll ~$1.138B), via Histometrics ingested federal statistics. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
5. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Definition — 314 Textile Product Mills (made-up textile goods except apparel: buying fabric/yarn/fiber and fabricating finished products). https://www.census.gov/naics/
6. Histometrics rollup primer, Textile Furnishings Mills (NAICS 3141), 2026 — and its underlying sources: 2022 Economic Census / County Business Patterns for 3141 (shipments ~$12.67B; firms 1,188; establishments 1,296; employment 43,233; annual payroll ~$2.092B; Q1 payroll ~$527.7M; CR4 41.8%; HHI ~616) and its children 31411 (shipments ~$9.34B; 184 firms; 237 plants; 25,931 employees; CR4 56.7%; HHI ~1,111) and 31412 (shipments $3.33B; 1,004 firms; 1,059 plants; 17,302 employees; CR4 21.1%; HHI ~192; 84.6% of plants under 20 employees); Floor Covering News Carpet: State of the Industry 2025 and Floor Daily on carpet's stabilizing share; Berkshire Hathaway 2025 Annual Report and Form 10-K (Shaw wholly owned, ~92% of carpet yarn processed internally; consumer shift to hard surfaces); Exencial Research Partners on Welspun (~45% of U.S. towel imports, ~59% of sheet imports) and Sheng Lu / U.S. Fashion Industry Association on home-textile import share; Mordor Intelligence (~$25B U.S. home-textile market) and USITC Shifts in U.S. Merchandise Trade 2021 ($15.4B home-furnishing textile imports); Federal Reserve Table 1.16 (NAICS 314120 value added ~$1.76B); Crown Crafts 2025 Annual Report (24.4% gross margin; two customers 66% of fiscal-2025 gross sales), Culp 2025 10-K (~$213M revenue), Icahn Enterprises 2025 10-K (WestPoint Home 18% gross margin), Dixie Group 2025 10-K (~$257M revenue; going-concern warning); CT Acquisitions (Engineered Floors ~$1.5B, #3); 1888 Mills (largest remaining U.S. towel mill, Griffin, Georgia); New Georgia Encyclopedia (Dalton cluster, ~85% within 65 miles); Floor Covering News on CARE assessment increases (~36% effective January 1, 2024); Associated Press on PFAS near Georgia carpet mills; U.S. EPA Textile Mills Effluent Guidelines; U.S. CBP on the 2025 de-minimis suspension and UFLPA; American Textile Company on robotics/AI investment; Chattanooga Times Free Press on Beaulieu's 2017 bankruptcy; Business Wire on Indo Count's 2024 Wamsutta acquisition.
7. Histometrics rollup primer, Other Textile Product Mills (NAICS 3149), 2026 — and its underlying sources: 2022 Economic Census / County Business Patterns for 3149 (shipments ~$10.41B; firms 3,552; establishments 3,701; employment 53,450; annual payroll ~$2.498B; Q1 payroll ~$610.7M; CR4 12.7%, CR8 17.7%, CR20 28.1%, CR50 44.2%; HHI 71.1) and its children 31491 (receipts ~$4.36B; ~1,340 firms; 20,774 employees; CR4 ~11.7%; HHI ~87.5) and 31499 (receipts ~$6.05B; 2,213 firms; 32,676 employees; CR4 20.0%; HHI 155), plus 314994 (shipments ~$1.887B; 106 firms; CR4 ~39%; HHI ~607) and 314999 (receipts ~$4.16B; 2,107 firms; CR4 ~22.5%); Berry Amendment via International Trade Administration and Congressional Research Service IF13001; Greif, Sonoco, Amcor, Patrick Industries (Tumacs Covers), LCI Industries, Avient (Dyneema), TransDigm (Airborne Systems), Culp and Unifi filings; Kordsa/Sabancı, Hyosung, Kolon, SRF, Bekaert, Toray, Teijin, Bridgestone Firestone Fibers, Milliken; WireCo/Onex, Samson, River Associates/Yale Cordage and Slingmax, Teufelberger/New England Ropes, Sterling Rope, Cortland; Audax/Covercraft (2021) and Oakley Capital/North Sails; Market Research Future (global textile-bag market ~$59.5B) and Future Market Insights (global FIBC ~$5.3B); IndexBox (U.S. cordage imports ~79,000 tons, 2024); IBISWorld (15,000+ U.S. commercial embroidery shops); ChemAnalyst (U.S. polyester staple fiber ~$1.50/kg, Q4 2025); BLS Producer Price Index March 2026 (NAICS 314910 +6.8% year over year; canvas and related products +7.2%) and BLS 2024 injury rates (3.8 recordable cases per 100 full-time workers); SBA Table of Size Standards (500–550 employees); California AB 1817 (PFAS textile restrictions effective January 1, 2025); CPSC Flammable Fabrics Act, FTC Textile Fiber Products Identification Act, CPAI-84 and NFPA 701, OSHA 29 CFR 1910.184 and cotton-dust standards; EPA textile-coating NESHAP and Textile Mills Effluent Guidelines.
8. Mohawk Industries, Form 10-K for FY2025 (U.S. carpet-and-rug market ~$11.2B within a $33.2B U.S. floor-covering market; Flooring North America operating margin ~3.1% in 2025 vs 6.3% in 2024), SEC, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/851968/000085196826000011/mhk-20251231.htm
9. Interface, Inc., Form 10-K for FY2025 (revenue $1.39B; 38.7% gross margin; 11.8% operating margin), SEC, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/715787/000071578726000006/tile-20251228.htm
10. Aimia Inc., Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results, 2026 (Cortland International: C$150.4M revenue, 22.4% gross margin, 13.2% adjusted EBITDA margin; Q4 2025 revenue −17.1%, adjusted EBITDA margin 12.0% vs 16.2% prior year). https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/aimia-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2025-results-882142684.html
11. Aimia Inc., Investor Presentation: Cortland Acquisition, July 2023 (C$26.6M consideration, ~C$36.5M trailing revenue, ~7.2× trailing adjusted EBITDA). https://www.aimia.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Investor-Presentation_Cortland-Acquisition_July-2023_FINAL.pdf
12. U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association, July 2025 Forecast — U.S. Tire Shipments, 2025 (340.2M units projected for 2025; replacement +4.4M, original equipment −1.4M vs. 2024). https://www.ustires.org/newsroom/ustma-july-2025-forecast
13. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, TSCA Section 8(a)(7) Reporting and Recordkeeping Requirements for Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (deadlines October 13, 2026 and April 13, 2027). https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-tsca/tsca-section-8a7-reporting-and-recordkeeping
14. WWD / Sourcing Journal, It Will Take More Than Tariffs to Bring Back U.S. Textile Manufacturing, 2025. https://wwd.com/sourcing-journal/industry-news/us-textile-manufacturing-tariffs-trade-ncto-cotswold-industries-mount-vernon-mills-1238937985/