RN Number Lookup

RN Numbers in the Label System

The RN number exists because a garment label has room for a code, not a company history. A shopper, retailer, importer or regulator who encounters an unfamiliar label can take the RN number printed on it — alongside the fiber content and care instructions — to the FTC's lookup and learn which registered company stands behind the product, including companies that imported the garments rather than manufacturing them domestically. For the apparel industry, that makes the RN system a working directory of the trade: sourcing staff use it to identify suppliers, and consumers use it to identify the source of a garment they own.

The search technique on this page is part of the term's practical value. Because company names in the system are recorded in full legal form, a plain search for a familiar short name can miss the registration. Searching on more than one field narrows results, and the wildcard behavior — an automatic trailing %, with an optional leading % to catch names where the search term is not at the start — is how a partial name is turned into a complete list of candidates, as the SPORTS examples show: SPORTSwear COUTURE INC and SPORTS VOGUE INC on the standard search, ARROW SPORTSwear CO INC added when the wildcard leads.

The RN sits inside a larger labeling system covered by the neighboring terms: care labels and wash care labels carry the instructions, care label symbols carry them across languages, main labels and woven or printed labels carry the brand and the RN itself, and Canada's CA number performs the parallel function north of the border. Read together, those pages describe the whole identity layer of a garment — the small printed and woven evidence of where a product came from and who is responsible for it, with the RN lookup as the tool that decodes it.