Apparel Strategist.com is the the premier online business journal of the US apparel and textile industry.
Our readership is top decision-makers in the apparel wholesale and retail sectors, and related companies, who require timely, pertinent information to help run their business more effectively.
Our site lets you see the current trends in the industry at a glance, and is a must-read for strategic planners, marketing departments, company libraries, lenders to the industry, institutional investors, or anyone else needing the vital statistics and trends of the apparel and textile industries.
For the past 25-plus years, we have been accurately reporting, predicting, and graphically displaying the business cycles in the industry, the reasons behind them, and what it means to you. Sometimes it’s promising, sometimes it’s not; either way it’s required information to compete effectively in today’s difficult business environment.
The Apparel Strategist is organized into logical sections containing graphs, tables, and commentary on:
- Retail - This is where it all starts…retail sales and inventory growth are the building blocks for all other metrics in the industry. In this section we track retail sales and growth trends, comparable store sales, retail employment, the performance of individual retail companies, and their impact on the other business segments of the industry.
- Consumer - When all is said and done, how much money gets spent, and where it gets spent, is decided by one group only…consumers! In this section we look at consumer confidence, debt, spending, saving, income, price inflation or deflation.
- Supply Side - An analysis of the manufacturing and wholesale side of the business, including domestic textile and apparel manufacturing sales and inventory, employment, production and capacity utilization, and pricing trends from raw materials to finished apparel.
- International Trade- which countries are expanding their textile and apparel trade with the US and which are losing out? This section includes textile and apparel imports and exports and analyzes the data by country and product category – to let you know who’s getting the growth and who’s giving it up.
- Economy and Markets - Here we take a look at key economic measures with major impact on apparel, such as unemployment, oil and other commodity prices, GDP growth, and other macroeconomic indicators. Also in this section are stock indexes, apparel and retail stock market gainers and losers, and insightful commentary on company news, executive changes, insider trading, and earnings.
- Spotlight - Unique company profiles in which we evaluate a company’s performance, strategy, and future prospects… always informative and certainly provocative.
- Editorial – Opinions and viewpoints on trends, issues, and challenges facing our industry.
- Historical Data – Downloadable Excel spreadsheets of key industry statistics.
The apparel industry is always subject to a great deal of hearsay. The Apparel Strategist’s perspective is fact-driven, clearly presented in the form of tables and graphs, and accompanied by concise and insightful commentary. Over the years we have accurately captured the cycles and changes in the industry and forecasted their impact on business. As a result, the The Apparel Strategist has earned its reputation as the only source for the no-nonsense reality of the apparel business…there is no alternative.
