Fashion Industry Research Companies

Fashion industry research companies conduct research and report their findings to benefit the apparel & textile industry.

Visit our fashion industry research section to find companies that conduct relevant research.

Fashion Industry Statistics

Apparel Research Reports

Retail Sales Forecasts

Fashion Start-Up Guides

Don't forget to visit the fashion library in our fashion industry terminology section.

What Each Kind of Research Is For

Industry statistics are the background numbers of the trade: the size of markets, the volume of trade and the direction of sales over time. They answer questions about scale before any individual company decision is taken. Apparel research reports gather findings on a topic in one place, whether the topic is a product category, a market or a production method, and they are the documents most often cited when a business case is being made. Retail sales forecasts look forward instead of back, estimating how much will sell and in which categories, so buyers, planners and suppliers can set orders and production against expected demand rather than against last season's results alone.

Fashion start-up guides serve a different reader. A new business entering the apparel industry needs the practical research behind starting up — where to source, how to plan a range and how to reach customers — and those guides collect that material in one section. The fashion library, in the terminology section, supports all of the above: research is easier to use when the terms in it are defined, so the library sits alongside the research pages as a reference for readers who meet an unfamiliar term in a report or forecast.

Reading research well is a skill in itself. A sound report states what was counted, over what period, and in which market, because a statistic about one country or one season cannot simply be read across to another. Definitions matter just as much: two reports may use the same category name for different groups of products, so checking how a report defines its categories is part of using its findings. Dates matter too, since apparel markets move quickly and an accurate finding from several seasons ago may describe a market that has since changed shape. The resources linked here reward that kind of reading: the statistics sections allow comparisons over time, the reports provide the context around headline numbers, and the forecasts make their forward assumptions visible so a reader can judge how much weight to put on them.

Taken together, the five linked resources form a small research workflow. Start with the statistics to establish the size of the question, read the reports for depth on the topic, check the forecasts for the direction of demand, consult the start-up guides if the reader is building a business rather than studying one, and use the terminology library whenever a report's vocabulary needs checking. That is the role research companies serve for the wider industry: turning raw information about markets and products into findings other businesses can act on.