Apparel Manufacturer Website

The Apparel Search Company launched a website called Apparel Manufacturer, created at the web address ApparelManufacturer.com. Apparel Manufacturer was an apparel industry search engine designed to search the internet for clothing factories around the world - and, just as importantly, for the subcontractors and suppliers a factory itself needs in order to produce.

The Apparel Manufacturer website was closed in December 2013. Its job did not disappear with it: the clothing manufacturers directory here on Apparel Search, linked at the top of this page with the factory, trim and contractor directories, is where factory finding lives now. This page records what the search engine was and how the industry used it.

Searching for Clothing Factories

From the Apparel Manufacturer engine, members of the clothing industry could search for clothing factories as well as apparel industry subcontractors. The factories indexed produced fashion articles such as shirts, pants, shoes, handbags, sweaters and lingerie - the full range of garment categories a brand or retailer might need made.

A factory search is a specialist tool. The buyer using it is not shopping; they are vetting production capacity - what a factory makes, in what quantities, and where. A search engine tuned to factories, rather than to the whole web, returned that kind of result first, which is why the company built one instead of relying on a general engine alone.

The Factory as Searcher

The engine worked in both directions. Garment factory owners were able to conveniently search for trim suppliers - the sources of the components every garment needs: hangers, zippers, fabric, thread, yarn, elastics, lace and more. A factory that cannot source its trim cannot finish its orders, so the supply side of the search mattered as much as the customer side.

That two-way design is what separated Apparel Manufacturer from a simple directory list. It treated the factory as both the thing being found and the party doing the finding, which is how factories actually sit in the supply chain - downstream of materials and components, upstream of brands and retailers.

Powered by Google, Tuned for Apparel

The Apparel Manufacturer search engine was powered primarily by Google. The Apparel Search Company tweaked the engine to fine-tune the results so they would be more relevant to factories and apparel manufacturing than an untuned search would return.

The site closed in December 2013, in the same consolidation that retired several of the company's single-purpose search engines. Manufacturing discovery continued on Apparel Search itself, through the manufacturers directory and the factory, trim and contractor directories linked above - hand-maintained listings rather than a search box, but covering the same ground.

The change of method suited the subject. Factory capability is not a popularity contest: a search engine ranks by signals that have little to do with whether a factory can cut and sew a given garment at a given quantity and quality. A maintained directory, where a listing states what a factory makes and where it sits, answers the sourcing question more honestly - slower to build, but closer to how production decisions are actually made.

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