Textile Bag and Canvas Mills (U.S.) — Investor's Primer (industry level)

NAICS 2022 code 31491. NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the standard code set the U.S. government uses to group businesses. This is the 5-digit "industry" level; the 6-digit detail lives one step down.

1. Overview

This industry cuts and sews heavy-duty fabric into finished goods — textile bags, tarpaulins (tarps), tents, awnings, sails, truck and boat covers, pool covers, and military packs. Firms here buy woven cloth or yarn from someone else and fabricate it; they are sewers and finishers, not the mills that weave the cloth [1].

For an investor it is a small, unglamorous, but durable slice of the industrial economy. Demand is spread across agriculture, construction, trucking, marine/recreation, events, and defense, so no single customer cycle sinks it — but it is intensely local, fragmented, and mostly privately owned.

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

At the 5-digit level, NAICS 31491 contains exactly one 6-digit national industry: 314910, Textile Bag and Canvas Mills. Nothing else rolls up here, so the 5-digit industry and the 6-digit detail describe the same set of businesses with the same federal statistics. This page is a short pass-through; the full analysis — scope, exclusions, company-by-company detail, and the complete economics — lives in the 314910 primer. Read that for depth.

3. How big it is (this level's rollup figures)

Because 31491 is identical to 314910, the federal totals are one and the same [2][3]:

(SBA is the U.S. Small Business Administration; its size standard is the employee ceiling below which a firm counts as "small" for federal programs — nearly every firm here clears it easily.)

Undercount caveat. The employer figures understate the number of operators: much awning, canvas-repair, and custom-cover work is done by one- and two-person nonemployer shops that don't appear in these counts, and some blurs into upholstery and repair trades — so more businesses touch this work than 1,340. Separately, the $4.36 billion receipts figure overstates domestic share of U.S. consumption: for commodity items (reusable totes, poly woven sacks, standard tarps, most bulk bags) imports from Asia dominate, and the domestic mills capture mainly the custom, urgent, oversized, or government-mandated portion. For scale, the global textile-bag market is estimated near $60 billion and the global flexible-bulk-bag market near $5.3 billion — the U.S. domestic-mill slice is a small fraction of what Americans consume [5][6].

4. Investable universe

Value across "the children" concentrates in the same place it does for 314910, because there is only one child. The blunt truth: no U.S.-listed company is a pure play on domestic textile-bag and canvas manufacturing. The closest public exposure is a thin, partial slice inside diversified companies:

• Industrial-packaging names: Greif (NYSE: GEF), which largely exited flexible bulk bags in 2022 [7]; Sonoco (NYSE: SON), via a small bulk-bag joint venture; and Amcor (NYSE: AMCR), whose relevant products are mostly plastic film, an adjacent code [8].
• Marine-and-RV-components names: Patrick Industries (NASDAQ: PATK) owns Tumacs Covers, a manufacturer of custom boat covers and bimini tops [9]; LCI Industries (NYSE: LCII) sells awnings and marine covers within much larger RV and transportation segments [10].
• Branded outdoor names (e.g., Johnson Outdoors, Clarus) design and sell tents/covers but generally manufacture abroad — consumer-brand plays, not domestic-mill plays.

Genuine ownership is private: thousands of family-owned canvas/awning/cover shops; private-equity-backed consolidators in flexible bulk bags, defense textiles, and specialty covers (such as Covercraft, which received a majority investment from Audax Private Equity in 2021 [11]); and sponsor-backed sail brands (North Sails, controlled through Oakley Capital-backed structures, has consolidated several leading sailmaking brands [12]). See the 314910 primer for the full table.

5. How the money works

Classic light manufacturing / cut-and-sew job-shop economics — not a branded consumer story. Owners earn the spread between fabricated selling price and the cost of fabric, thread, and hardware, run through a plant whose fixed costs must be covered by throughput. Skilled sewing labor is the bottleneck and hard to automate. Commodity goods (standard tarps, poly bags) compete on price with imports and carry thin margins; custom and made-to-measure work (a specific boat cover, a restaurant awning, a Berry-compliant military order) supports far better margins through service, speed, fit, and specification lock-in. BLS reported that industry selling prices were 6.8% higher in March 2026 than in March 2025, including a 7.2% increase for canvas and related products [13] — indicating converters have recently raised output prices, though it does not show whether increases kept pace with labor and materials.

6. Demand drivers

A bundle of loosely correlated end markets — which is exactly why the industry is steadier than any one of them: agriculture (seed, feed, and bulk bags); construction (tarps, jobsite covers); trucking and logistics (flatbed and dump tarps, liners); marine and recreation (sails, boat and pool covers, tents); events and hospitality (party tents, awnings, patio shade); and defense (military tents, packs, covers). A structural tailwind: single-use-plastic-bag bans lift demand for reusable textile totes [5].

7. Regulation

The dominant rule is the Berry Amendment (10 U.S.C. §4862), a domestic-sourcing law requiring that most Department of Defense purchases of textiles — including tents, tarps, covers, and bags — be made in the United States from fiber onward [14][15]. It carves out a protected, import-proof pocket of demand for "Berry-compliant" fabricators. Beyond that:

• Flammability standards: CPAI-84 (a tent-flammability standard from the Canvas Products Association International) and NFPA 701 (a National Fire Protection Association flame-propagation test) for tents and awnings [16].
• PFAS and chemical regulation: PFAS-based coatings for water and stain resistance are under increasing scrutiny. California AB 1817 restricted new regulated-PFAS textile articles beginning January 1, 2025 [17], and the EPA is studying PFAS use in textile manufacturing [18]. Converters face product, reporting, and reformulation risk.
• Workplace safety: BLS reported a 2024 total-recordable injury and illness rate of 3.8 cases per 100 full-time workers [19]. Cutting equipment, repetitive motion, and installation work all create underwriting concerns.
• Trade policy: Tariffs and antidumping actions set how much commodity volume stays onshore.

8. Consolidation

One of the most fragmented manufacturing industries in the federal data. The four largest firms hold just 11.7% of receipts, the top eight 19.1%, the top twenty 36.1%, and even the top fifty only 54.5%; the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI, a standard concentration measure where higher means more concentrated) is about 87.5 — near the theoretical floor [2]. Consolidation is slow but real in two niches — flexible bulk bags and defense textiles — while the long tail of small awning and canvas shops remains a patient private roll-up opportunity with no natural national champion. The Covercraft transaction [11] and North Sails' sponsor-backed consolidation [12] demonstrate that specialty brands and technical capability can attract private capital.

9. Risks

Import competition and tariff whiplash (the core structural risk); input-cost volatility (cotton, polypropylene, PVC, energy); scarce and aging skilled sewing labor; cyclicality and lumpy custom/government orders; thin margins and low entry barriers; substitution by rigid containers and plastic film; policy dependence in the attractive defense pocket (Berry Amendment plus defense-budget cycles); chemical-regulation and PFAS reformulation cost [17][18]; and product liability for shelters, awnings, and bags used in food-contact or hazardous-material applications.

10. How to invest and the outlook

Public routes are limited — there is no clean listed way to own this industry, and no dedicated exchange-traded fund (ETF) targets the code. The honest options are a diversified packaging stock (GEF, SON, AMCR) where textile bags are a minor or divested line; a marine-and-RV-components company (PATK, LCII) where canvas covers and awnings are a small piece of a large business [9][10]; or branded outdoor names that mostly manufacture abroad. London-listed Oakley Capital Investments provides fund-level exposure to North Sails, again without a separately reported U.S. result [12]. The returns are private: buy and professionalize a profitable regional canvas/awning/cover shop, build a roll-up of local fabricators, acquire a bulk-bag producer, or back a Berry-compliant defense-textile platform. Watch reshoring and defense demand, plastic-bag policy [5], the tariff trajectory, PFAS reformulation requirements, and end-market cycles. Bottom line: a small, fragmented, import-pressured light-manufacturing industry — a footnote for public-market investors, but a legitimate, cash-generative niche for private operators who specialize and consolidate. For the complete picture, read the 314910 primer.

---

Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS Definition — 314910 Textile Bag and Canvas Mills," 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?input=314910&year=2022
2. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 Economic Census — Concentration and Comparative Statistics, NAICS 314910 (receipts, firms, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI)," 2022. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
3. U.S. Census Bureau, "County Business Patterns 2023 — NAICS 314910 (establishments, employment, payroll)," 2023. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
4. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Table of Size Standards (NAICS 314910 — 500 employees)," 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
5. Market Research Future, "Textile Bag Market Size, Share, Analysis & Forecast Report (global ~$59.5B, 2024)," 2024. https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/textile-bag-market-25519
6. Future Market Insights, "Flexible Intermediate Bulk Container (FIBC) Market (global ~$5.3B, 2024)," 2024. https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/fibc-market
7. Greif, Inc., "Form 10-K FY2024" and PRNewswire, "Greif Completes Sale of Flexible Packaging (FIBC) Joint Venture," 2022–2024. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/greif-inc-completes-the-sale-of-flexible-packaging-joint-venture-to-gulf-refined-packaging-301515716.html
8. Packaging Dive / PRNewswire, "Amcor Completes Acquisition of Berry Global (April 30, 2025; ~$23B combined sales)," 2025. https://www.packagingdive.com/news/amcor-closes-berry-global-acquisition/746755/
9. Patrick Industries, "Form 10-K (Tumacs Covers acquisition and description)," 2021–2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/76605/000007660522000047/patk-20211231.htm
10. LCI Industries, "Form 10-K FY2025 (awnings and marine covers segment)," 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/763744/000076374426000011/lcii-20251231.htm
11. Audax Private Equity, "Audax Private Equity Announces Majority Investment in Covercraft Industries," 2021. https://www.audaxprivateequity.com/news/audax-private-equity-announces-majority-investment-in-covercraft-industries
12. Oakley Capital Investments, "2024 Annual Report — North Sails," 2024. https://www.oakleycapitalinvestments.com/2024-annual-report/p019-consumer-north-sails-15099-T01.html
13. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Producer Price Index Detailed Report — March 2026 (NAICS 314910 price changes)," 2026. https://www.bls.gov/ppi/detailed-report/ppi-detailed-report-march-2026.pdf
14. Congressional Research Service, "Domestic Preference Statutes: The Berry Amendment and the Kissell Amendment (IF13001)," 2024. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF13001
15. International Trade Administration (trade.gov), "The Berry Amendment (covered items: textiles, tents, tarps, covers, bags)," 2024. https://www.trade.gov/berry-amendment
16. Instent / National Fire Protection Association, "CPAI-84 and NFPA 701 flammability standards for tents, canopies, and awnings," 2024. https://www.instent.com/blog/does-cpai-84-meet-nfpa-701/
17. California Legislature, "AB 1817 — Product safety: textile articles: perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS restrictions effective January 1, 2025)," 2022. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB1817
18. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Textile Mills Effluent Guidelines (PFAS use and wastewater discharge review)," 2024. https://www.epa.gov/eg/textile-mills-effluent-guidelines
19. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Table 1 — Incidence rates of nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses by industry (2024)," 2024. https://www.bls.gov/web/osh/table-1-industry-rates-national.htm