Womenswear Guides: Buyers Guides, Manufacturers Directories and Market Reports for Women's Wear

Check the Publication Year Before You Buy

A buyers directory is a snapshot of the womenswear trade in the year it was published. The buyers named in it held those jobs at that time, buying for the stores listed at the addresses given, and the manufacturers entries describe companies as they stood when the edition closed for press. That snapshot is progressively less reliable afterwards. Womenswear buyers change departments and employers frequently, department stores and specialty chains merge or close, and manufacturers change officers, price points and the garments they produce. For that reason the editions gathered here span more than a decade of publication dates, and each one should be judged on its date first. A recent edition is a selling tool. An older edition is a record of how the women's and children's wear trade was organized in its year, useful for research, but its contact details should not be relied on for current approaches without independent checking. The market reports on this page need the same date check in a different form: a report estimating demand for 2007 describes the market as its authors measured it then, not as it stands now.

The Buyers Guides: Women's and Children's Wear Buyers

Two editions of the same buyers guide head this page. Women's and Children's Wear Buyers, 2010-2011 is the most recent edition in the group, and Women's and Children's Wear Buyers 2008-2009 is the edition before it. Both were published by Salesmans Guide. The directory is written for readers who are just beginning in the women's or children's apparel market as well as for readers looking to revitalize an existing business, and it lists over 13,500 key executives and buyers, so a seller can reach the decision-makers directly rather than wasting time talking to the wrong people. Each listing includes key information: contact names and titles, the type of merchandise bought, the number of stores, street and P.O. Box addresses, phone and fax numbers, and website and e-mail addresses. That field list is what makes a buyers guide a selling tool rather than a name list — the merchandise type tells a representative whether a buyer purchases the line being sold, and the store count shows the scale of the account before the first call is made.

The pairing in the title is worth noticing: women's wear and children's wear are covered together, as one buying market. That reflects how the trade was organized — the same department stores and specialty chains bought women's and children's clothing through related departments, and many manufacturers produced both ranges — so a single buyers guide could serve a seller of either line. The Fashiondex Books section is the check for current-year buyer guides before any of these dated editions is bought.

The National Register of Apparel Manufacturers: Women and Children's Wear

Where the buyers guides list the people who purchase womenswear, the National Register lists the companies that manufacture it. The National Register of Apparel Manufacturers: Women & Children's Wear, Seventh Edition gives full company information on nearly 4,000 apparel manufacturers in the United States. It is fully indexed for easy cross-reference, and each entry gives company details and officers, fax numbers, year established, dollar volume, number of employees, price range, and type of activity — including whether the company sells licenses — together with what type of garments the company produces, the fabrics used, and other labels affiliated with the company. That field list makes the Register useful in both directions: a retailer or brand can search it for a manufacturer by garment type and fabric, and a supplier can read a prospective customer's scale from its dollar volume, employee count and price range before making contact.

The Women's Wear Market Buyer's Guide

The oldest buyers title on this page is The Women's Wear Market Buyer's Guide, published by Infomart on June 1, 1998. It belongs to the same family as the Salesmans Guide volumes — a printed guide to the buyers of women's wear — but at more than a decade older than the 2010-2011 edition it should be treated as background and historical reference rather than as a current contact list. Its value today is in showing how the women's wear buying market was structured at the end of the 1990s, and in the names and store groups that shaped that structure.

Market Reports: Womenswear Demand by City, Country and Market Entry

Three reports on this page answer a different question from the directories. A buyers guide answers who to call; a market report answers where the demand is and how large it might be. All three use the idea of latent demand — estimated market potential, which may or may not represent real sales — and each applies it at a different scale.

The 2007 Report on Womenswear: World Market Segmentation by City

This report was created for global strategic planners who cannot be content with traditional methods of segmenting world markets. In a borderless world, cities become a more important criterion for prioritizing markets than regions, continents or countries. The report covers the top 2,000 cities in over 200 countries, reporting the estimated market size, in terms of latent demand, for each major city. It then ranks the cities and reports them as a percent of the country where they are located, of their geographic region — Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America or Latin America — and of the total world market. To an economist or strategic planner, a city in this method is not a population inside rigid geographical boundaries but an area of dominant influence over markets in adjacent areas, and that influence varies from one industry to another and from one period to another. The report therefore allocates a portion of worldwide demand to each city, on the broader definition that a city is part of the global market.

The 2007-2012 Outlook for Womenswear in India

This study covers the latent demand outlook for womenswear across the states, union territories and cities of India. Latent demand, in millions of U.S. dollars — potential industry earnings estimates — is given across over 5,100 cities in India. For each city, the percent share the city holds of its state or union territory and of India as a whole is reported. Those comparative benchmarks allow a reader to gauge a city quickly: how much of a state's womenswear demand sits in one centre, and how that centre compares with the national total.

Womenswear in United Kingdom: A Strategic Entry Report, 1997

The primary audience for this report, published in the Strategic Planning Series, is managers involved with the highest levels of the strategic planning process and the consultants who help their clients with that task. It helps executives evaluate strategic investment and entry alternatives in the United Kingdom. Icon Group International, Inc. draws on a methodology developed by Professor Philip Parker at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, which decomposes a country's strategic potential along two key dimensions: latent demand and accessibility. A country may have very high latent demand yet low accessibility, making it a less attractive market than a smaller potential country with higher accessibility. Hundreds of statistics on the United Kingdom are benchmarked against regional and global averages, so a reader can see where the United Kingdom fits into the regional and global perspective. The report first investigates the economic fundamentals that are the source of the United Kingdom's latent demand, then details its accessibility, covering entry alternatives including export strategies and local direct investment strategies, local marketing — advertising, distribution and pricing issues — entry strategies such as opening an office or joint venturing, human resources and legal risks. Icon Group International, with offices in Europe, Africa and the United States and a number of specialty research groups, published the report through its Consumer Products Research Group, describing its publications as timely and reliable market information offered as a complement to strategic planning processes, at a price well below the cost of a round-trip business-class ticket.

Researching Womenswear Beyond the Guides

Printed guides and reports are one route into the womenswear market; the linked Apparel Search sections are the others, and they divide the subject by the question being asked. For the clothing itself, the women's clothes guide works category by category, and the linked pages on women's fashion, women's apparel and womenswear fashion brands explain the terms and the labels of the market. For the people who buy, the Women's Fashion Buyers page covers finding womenswear buyers directly, and the Fashion Industry Buyers hub places that search alongside the menswear and childrenswear buyers sections. For the places that sell, the Women's Clothing Stores and Women's Clothing Wholesalers directories list the retail and wholesale sides of the trade, and the Salesman Buyer Guides collect the wider family the Salesmans Guide titles belong to.

Keeping This List Current

New womenswear directories appear as publishers revise their editions, and this list is updated when new womens clothing directories are found, although no guarantee can be made that every new edition is captured. Readers who find newer clothing guides for womenswear are welcome to let Apparel Search know so the guide can be added. Readers who arrived here looking for a different market have the same choices in the other two audiences: the Menswear Guide covers men's clothing guides and directories, and the Childrenswear Guides cover children's clothing guides and directories, each with the same publication-year caution applied to its own editions.