The Apparel Salesman's Guide to Retailers and Buyers in the US and Canada: 2006-07 Edition

A Buyers Guide in Five Volumes

The 2006-07 set divides the buying trade by market, and the buyer counts show the scale of each part. Women's and Children Wear Buyers lists 20,000 buyers in the USA and Canada. Men's and Boy's Wear Buyers lists 13,600 buyers. Sporting Goods & Active Wear Buyers lists 18,400 buyers. Mass Merchandisers & Off-Price Apparel Buyers lists 9,400 buyers. Gifts, Housewares & Home Textiles Buyers lists over 15,000 buyers. Together the five volumes name more than 76,000 retailer executives and buyers — the population a salesman in 2006 needed to reach the decision-makers at major US and Canadian apparel stores without wasting time on the wrong people.

Who Was Listed

The directories provide access to retailer executives and buyers across the store types that sold apparel in the US and Canada: specialty stores, boutiques, mail order, online retailers, family clothing stores, department stores, buying offices, mass merchandisers and off-price apparel buyers. The merchandise those buyers purchased covers men's, women's and children's apparel, active wear, sporting goods, home furnishings, fashion accessories, footwear, gifts and housewares. That breadth is the set's character: a salesman carrying several kinds of lines could work the whole route from one publisher's guides, changing volumes as the merchandise changed, while a specialist seller used the single volume for a market.

The RN-WPL Encyclopedia Disk

Alongside the printed volumes, the set included the RN-WPL Encyclopedia on computer disk, with identical data to the directories. The RN and WPL systems are the registration records that identify the companies behind garments and textile products, and an encyclopedia of them on disk let a user cross-check a company found on a label against the same data held in the guides. In 2006 the disk was the electronic half of the set: the books for the desk and the road, the disk for the office computer. Researchers using the edition today should treat the disk's data exactly as they treat the books — as the record of its year.

Using a 2006-07 Edition Today

The fashion guides on this page are now outdated, and that fact governs their use. Buyer names, titles, store addresses and company details from 2006-07 cannot be relied on for a current approach: buyers change jobs, stores merge and close, and chains have been renamed since the edition closed. What the set still offers is a faithful picture of how the US and Canadian buying trade was organized in its year — which store types bought which merchandise, how the markets divided, and the scale of each buying population — which is genuine research value for anyone studying the trade or tracing a company's history. For current selling, the publishing company does have newer editions, and for newer fashion directories the Briefings Media Group section, linked in the navigation on this page, is the place to go; return to the Fashion Directory Guide main page for the rest of this section.

Checking Directory Data

Apparel Search does not maintain or own the directories described on this page; the information is provided so viewers can research and purchase fashion industry guides and directories more easily. Reliance on directory data should only be undertaken after an independent review of its accuracy, completeness, efficacy and timeliness, and Apparel Search cannot accept responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information or for loss or damage caused by any use of it.

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