Garment Industry Data Sources

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Government and Open Sources

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics' fashion spotlight is the starting point for labor-side data on the industry, and California's Department of Industrial Relations maintains the Garment Manufacturers & Contractors Registration Database — a working registry of the state's garment contractors that doubles as a research source on the contracting structure of the Los Angeles industry. Data.gov opens the federal data catalog generally, the School of Data teaches the methods for working with such sources, and the Statistic Brain Research Institute and Praescient Analytics publish compiled fashion industry statistics and garment industry analysis. These sources share a virtue and a limit: they are free and inspectable, but each covers the slice of the industry its publisher measures, so the global, short-cycle, variety-heavy character of the trade has to be assembled from several of them at once.

Commercial Analytics and the Apparel Search Collection

The NPD Group — now Circana — offers data, industry expertise and prescriptive analytics to help businesses measure, predict and improve performance across all channels, with offices in 27 cities across the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific; commercial panels of that kind supply the consumer-purchase detail government surveys cannot. On Apparel Search, the companion resources are the fashion industry statistics directory, the government resources collection, the apparel research reports guide, financial information and the education books section, plus the clothing industry resources blog post. A sound research workflow runs in that order: frame the question with the free registries and government series, then use commercial analytics for the channel-level detail, checking each figure's population and period before comparing it with any other.