Fashion Industry Directories: Clothing, Factory, Boutique and Wholesale Guides

Directories by Audience: Children, Men and Women

Three of the directories divide the trade by the customer a business serves. The Children's Fashion Directory is for childrenswear: businesses that sell kids clothing or fashion accessories for children list there, and readers use it to find kids apparel factories, retail stores, distributors and brands. The Men's Fashion Directory covers menswear companies — a men's fashion retailer, wholesaler or manufacturer belongs in that listing. The Women's Fashion Directory is the womenswear counterpart, for women's fashion wholesalers, clothes stores and manufacturers, and it also points readers toward women's fashion trend services, fashion brands, beauty products and fashion designers. Choosing the audience first is the fastest way to shorten a search, because a directory organized around one market excludes the companies that sell to the other two.

Directories by Kind of Business

Four directories sort companies by what they do rather than whom they serve. The Clothing Industry Directory is the broadest of them: it covers nearly all aspects of the clothing industry, including men's clothing, women's clothing and children's clothing, garment trimming suppliers and textile machinery. It is not as large as Apparel Search itself, but it holds a wide assortment of resources in one place. The Clothing Factory Directory is narrower and more practical for sourcing: it is for clothing factories, and the owner of a manufacturing facility that produces apparel or fashion accessories can list a clothing factory or textile factory there. The Fashion Boutique Directory serves specialty stores selling clothing or fashion accessories, so a boutique owner or employee can list the business where boutique shoppers and brands look. The Wholesale Apparel Directory is for clothing wholesalers — sellers of wholesale women's fashion, wholesale menswear or wholesale childrenswear — and it also carries sections for wholesale fabric, wholesale textile machinery and wholesale trims and notions.

Specialist Directories: Technology and Trims

Two directories serve suppliers rather than garment businesses. The Fashion Technology Directory is for companies that provide fashion software or technology-related services to the fashion industry: fashion design software such as CAD systems, and e-commerce and supply chain management technologies. A technology company belongs there only when its product or service is directly relevant to the clothing or textile industries. The Trims and Notions Directory is where fashion trimming is found — zippers, buttons, labels, hangtags, hangers and sewing thread. Trims are easy to overlook in a general clothing directory because they are components rather than finished garments, so a dedicated listing keeps component suppliers visible to the factories and brands that buy from them.

Finding People, Brands and News

Alongside the company directories, the navigation at the top of this page links to the working Apparel Search directories for people and information. The Fashion News Directory and the Fashion Industry Buyers guide serve trade readers and sellers; the Fashion Model Directory, Fashion Jobs Directory and Fashion Designer Directory are organized around people and careers; and the Fashion Brand Directory and the Fashion Directory — the clothes guide — organize labels and garments. The Fashion on Facebook Directory collects the trade's presence on Facebook. A reader who starts from the trade's reference sections can also move sideways to Fashion Terms for definitions, Fashion Companies for company profiles, and the Fashion Schools listings for education.

List a Company in the Right Directory

Directories only stay useful when listings land in the right one, and that discipline matters for search visibility as well. A company should be listed only on the directories appropriate to it, in a respectful manner: a fashion boutique, for example, should not be listed on a clothing factory directory. The rule is common sense applied to categories — audience directories for the market served, business-type directories for the work actually done, and specialist directories only for genuinely relevant products or services. Listings placed in the wrong directory waste the reader's time and can lead to a company being banned from all of the directories, so accuracy about what a business does is worth more than extra exposure in the wrong place.