Gildan Activewear

Gildan Activewear Inc. is the Montreal manufacturer of basic family apparel — T-shirts, fleece, sport shirts, underwear, socks and hosiery — founded in 1984 by brothers Glenn and Greg Chamandy, which built its business on vertically integrated, low-cost manufacturing in Central America and the Caribbean and on the printwear trade that decorates its blank shirts. Gildan trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol GIL. Its owned brands include Gildan, Gold Toe, Anvil and Comfort Colors, and in December 2025 it completed the acquisition of Hanesbrands, the American innerwear company profiled in this section, in a transaction valued at about $2.2 billion in equity terms.

Company Profile

The summaries trace the acquisition ladder: Anvil Holdings in 2012, Alstyle Apparel announced in 2016, and — the purchase that made trade headlines — American Apparel's brand and assets for $88 million at a bankruptcy auction in 2017. Each deal bought distribution or a brand name in a market where the underlying garment is deliberately undifferentiated; scale and cost, not design, are the competitive weapons.

The May 2015 summary lists the architecture plainly: company-owned brands, brand extensions such as Secret, Silks and Therapy Plus in hosiery and shapewear, and licences including the U.S. sock licence for Under Armour and licences for Mossy Oak and New Balance. Sold through printwear distributors in North America and Europe and through retailers as branded basics, the same factories feed both channels.

The range behind the name is T-shirts, fleece, sport shirts, underwear, socks, hosiery and shapewear under owned brands and licences. Its customers are printwear distributors in North America and Europe, and retail customers for branded basics. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Gildan Activewear in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Gildan Activewear with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Operating — Gildan completed its acquisition of Hanesbrands on December 1, 2025, adding the Hanes, Champion and Bali brands to its basics business — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

Company summaries of this kind were the working tool of the apparel trade as much as of investors: a buyer, landlord or supplier checking Gildan Activewear could see its scale, its headquarters and its own description of its business in a few paragraphs. Those dated descriptions are kept with their dates, because a store count from 2013 or a strategy statement from 2019 is evidence about that year, not about today. The current position is the one given in the snapshot: operating.