Clothing B2B Website

If you are a member of the fashion industry, or simply love fashion, the ClothingB2B.com website is worth a try. Clothing B2B is a fashion industry search engine - a search tool pointed at the clothing business itself rather than at the shopping public. The B2B in its name is the whole idea: business to business, the trade talking to the trade.

This is one of the shortest descriptions in the websites family, because the site itself makes a short promise. A directory lists what an editor has gathered; a B2B search engine instead takes the trade's own questions - which company makes this, who supplies that, where is a factory for the other - and searches the clothing industry's web for the answers.

A Search Engine for the Trade

Consumer search is built around buying things. Business-to-business search is built around finding companies: manufacturers, wholesalers, suppliers, service providers. The questions differ, so the tooling differs. A retailer searching at the trade level is looking for a line to stock; a brand is looking for a factory; a factory is looking for trim. Clothing B2B was built for that layer of question.

The fashion industry is unusually fragmented - thousands of small companies, many with minimal web presence, spread across every garment category and every continent. A general search engine knows the web's popularity order; a trade search engine exists to impose the industry's order instead, so that a small specialist supplier can be found by the buyer who needs exactly that specialty.

Search and Directory, Side by Side

Clothing B2B belongs to the same family as the company's search engines for manufacturers, retailers and wholesalers, and to the opposite family from its directories. The directories - Apparel Search itself first among them - are gathered and maintained by people, listing by listing. The search engines trade that curation for reach: anything the trade has put on the web can surface, whether or not an editor has ever seen it.

Used together, the two approaches cover each other's weaknesses. Start in the directory when you want vetted structure - categories, locations, known names. Turn to the B2B search when the directory's categories do not fit the thing you are hunting, or when the company you need is too new or too small to be listed yet.

For Industry Members and Fashion Lovers

The invitation on this page has always been addressed to both audiences: members of the fashion industry, and people who simply love fashion. Trade tools have a way of interesting enthusiasts too, because they reveal the industry's wiring - who makes what, where things come from, how many companies stand behind a single garment on a rail.

What more is there to know? The site is part of the Apparel Search Company websites family, listed on page 2 of the series, and the other members of the family - the directories, the jobs sites, the media sites - are described across this section for readers working their way through how the company organized the trade online.

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