Apparel Wholesaler Website

The Apparel Wholesaler website, at ApparelWholesaler.com, was an apparel industry search engine designed to search the internet for wholesale clothing. From this engine, members of the garment industry and consumers could search for women's wholesale clothing, men's wholesale clothing and children's wholesale clothing - the bulk-buying layer of the fashion business, given a search box of its own.

The Apparel Wholesaler website was retired on December 1, 2018, after one of the more eventful lives in the website family: closed in December 2013, re-launched in April 2014 because it was judged a beneficial resource, and finally retired four years later. The wholesale directories on Apparel Search, linked above, carry its purpose now.

Searching Wholesale Clothing

The engine searched the entire internet for wholesale clothing and returned results tuned to the subject. Beyond the three market divisions - women's, men's and children's - users could search specific categories such as women's shoes, jeans, sweaters and handbags, because wholesale buying is category buying: a retailer stocks a rail at a time, not a garment at a time.

The Apparel Wholesaler search engine was powered primarily by Google technology, tweaked by the Apparel Search Company to fine-tune the results so they would be more relevant to wholesaling. As with the family's manufacturer and retailer engines, the company's contribution was aim: the industry's own sense of what a wholesale result looks like, applied to a general engine's reach.

Closed, Re-opened, Retired

In December 2013 the website was closed, in the same consolidation that retired most of the family's single-purpose sites. Shortly after, in April 2014, the company decided to re-launch the site, because it believed the engine was a beneficial resource for the apparel industry - the only member of that December class to be brought back so quickly.

The reprieve lasted until December 1, 2018, when the site was retired for good. Wholesale search had by then settled into the main guide's wholesale clothing directories, which are maintained as listings rather than as a search engine - the men's, women's and children's wholesale directories linked at the top of this page.

Wholesale on Apparel Search

Wholesale is the trade's middle layer: manufacturers and importers sell in quantity to retailers, who sell one piece at a time to the public. A search engine for that layer served the people doing the quantity buying, and its retirement did not retire the need - it moved the need into directories where listings can be checked and kept current by hand.

Readers looking for wholesalers today should start with the fashion wholesaler directory above and narrow by market. The search-engine era of this subject is recorded here; the directory era continues on the main guide.

The wholesaler's own world explains why the directory form fits it. Wholesale relationships are repeated relationships - a retailer returns to the same suppliers season after season - so being findable in a stable listing, with the right market and category attached, is worth more to a wholesaler than ranking in a search whose results reshuffle daily. The engine served the era of searching; the directories serve the era of returning.

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