When the U.S. announced a slate of retaliatory tariffs on countries around the globe, it shocked the international apparel community. Brands and retailers that do business in the States immediately began strategizing how to mitigate the impact, including potentially rerouting production to countries with the lowest tariff rates or other favorable advantages. It’s a complicated series of calculations due to the many variables that go into each sourcing decision. And it’s made more difficult because there’s no way to know whether the tariffs—most of which have been paused—will go into effect as initially planned. But what is clear is that the U.S. textile and apparel industry is unlikely to be a meaningful beneficiary of these trade actions.
“What we’ve seen announced so far is decidedly against U.S. manufacturing,” Steve Lamar, president and CEO of the American Apparel & Footwear Association, said shortly after the tariffs were announced. Lamar explained what everyone in the industry understands: most inputs and equipment are imported. “U.S. manufacturers just woke up and found that it got a lot more expensive for them to manufacture in the United States.”
While Steve Hawkins, president of the America Knits apparel factory in Swainsboro, G.A., agreed that the tariffs are inflicting pain at home, he said the government has to do something. “Whether you like the current administration or don’t like them, the USA has a serious problem. The interest we pay on our debt is a bigger part of our budget than what we pay to protect our country,” he said. “It’ll probably be some bad days before they’re all good, but nothing good ever happens overnight.”
Marianne Webber, CEO and founder of the Quick Turn Clothing apparel factory in NYC, began in the apparel business in the 80s, back when the majority of U.S. clothing was made domestically. She has watched offshoring take over, so she agrees that the government must take action. “I can understand why this administration is trying to address it,” she said. “I don’t think that just tariffs alone are the answer.”
Ultimately, Webber said the solution is to do something that directly supports U.S. production. From her perspective, the current policy will only raise prices for consumers, putting a hardship on them and potentially resulting in slower retail sales. “So, I don’t think that, in and of itself, is going to change the landscape of the manufacturing problem in our country.”
But there are strategies that could help. And when asked, U.S. based experts were only too eager to enumerate how Washington could support and even bolster a reshoring effort that both creates jobs and puts an end to practices that have been undermining what’s left of the industry.
1. Return to quotas
Webber is onboard with the tactic of making imports more expensive—but she said, there’s a better way. It would require turning back the clock.
Under the Multi-Fibre Arrangement and later the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, developed nations were able to establish bilateral agreements with developing nations that restricted the amount of textiles and apparel they imported. That all ended in 2005. From there, overseas production accelerated.
“I can understand why this administration is trying to address [offshoring]. I don’t think that just tariffs alone are the answer.”
—Marianne Webber, Quick Turn Clothing
The value of apparel produced annually in the U.S. since quotas were removed has dropped by 66 percent from $27.7 billion in 2004 to $9.3 billion in 2003, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Accordingly, the number of apparel manufacturing facilities dropped from 12,360 to 6,546 during the same period.
“There is no way that you’re going to stop people from making things in Cambodia and China and Vietnam, but what we can do is have more innovation and design if we make certain products more expensive to import. And that would be through quotas,” Webber said. Before 2005, she recalls her business surging in the fourth quarter every year as brands and retailers hit their quotas on imports. “If a retailer wanted this category, they had to make it here.”
In that way, tariff rate quotas are more effective than blanket tariffs because they impact the industry’s behavior in a way that’s favorable to U.S.-based companies, she said.
2. Nix De Minimis
The de minimis exemption, which allows goods worth less than $800 to enter the U.S. duty free, has also been unfavorable to this industry.
According to U.S. Customs & Border Protection, these shipments account for 92 percent of all cargo entering the U.S. In an interview with Supply Chain Dive, National Council of Textile Organizations president and CEO Kim Glas called de minimis “a disaster” for U.S. textile and apparel manufacturers, citing that 18 manufacturing plants closed in 2024 alone, which she attributes to the exemption.
“It’s a huge impact on the industry,” said Don Bockoven, CEO of polyester staple fiber plant Darling Fibers in Darlington, S.C. “If you took the 4 million packages a day coming in, we estimate more than half of those have apparel. And if you said, we know that most apparel is at least 60 percent polyester. If I do that math, saying the average package is a pound, I could run my entire plant if we shut that down.”
As of May 2, the Trump administration has deemed that imports from China are no longer eligible for de minimis. But it remains to be seen to what degree that will stem the tide of goods entering from that nation. “The issue with any of these things is enforcement,” Bockoven said.
Not only is CBP flooded with packages each day challenging enforcement efforts, but Bockoven has heard from people at the agency that almost as soon as they file a fine—say for packages containing fentanyl or goods suspected of containing Uyghur cotton—the shippers’ lawyers, who are on site, argue it down to next to nothing. Think $5,000 down to $50. If this is the case, it’s little wonder why infractions occur regularly. It’s essentially another loophole. “If it’s a $100,000 penalty for sending something bad in, you get caught once and you’re not going to do it again,” he said.
3. Amend yarn forward
Getting rid of de minimis is just one legislative tool that could directly help U.S. suppliers like Darling Fibers, which has been battered by foreign competition.
The plant has been shuttered for two years. After a rough patch in the early 2000s when it shut down, the company was able to resume operations only to face another closure due to Covid. It was able to reemerge briefly due to a surge of business immediately after as consumer spending spiked. That success promoted executives to bring more capacity online but by mid 2022 the Russian war with Ukraine flooded cheap Russian oil into Asia, tanking raw materials prices from that region. Darling Fibers could not compete.
Bockoven and his colleagues have been fighting for enforcement of antidumping duties, but as he said, it’s proven to be a game of Whack-A-Mole. Eventually, they turned their attention to Section 201 of the Trade Act, citing immediate harm and injury to the industry. There was hope for stiff tariffs and quotas but that hasn’t panned out. “If we had gotten what we needed, I probably would have been able to go out to the market and get some commitments for long term sales and would have been able to restart,” Bockoven explained.
Despite the discouraging outcome, he still believes Washington can help the fiber industry in this country. And it starts with reworking the language in existing free trade agreements. Under agreements like USMCA and CAFTA-DR, products qualify for duty-free status if all stages of production, from yarn to finished garment, happen in partner countries. The result is these industries can offer favorable pricing compared to other nations.
In 2024, 66 percent of U.S. exports of fiber, yarn and fabric went to USMCA and CAFTA-DR countries, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Currently, Darling Fibers products are excluded from this protection. “Because we’re staple fiber, it goes into the yarn spinning, which then becomes yarn so we’re not covered by yarn forward,” he said. “So, one of the things I’ve been pushing is, ‘Should we get fiber forward?’”
At the same time, Bockoven would like the government to put its weight behind circularity, though he admits with this administration that idea has “lost a little bit of steam.”
An investment in circularity would level the playing field for his business as well, he said. “[In that case,] I’m not relying on oil anymore. The feedstock is here,” he said. “I think that would create some natural renaissance of the industry.”
4. Reskill the workforce
For Peter Wai Chan, managing partner of New York City-based garment factory Sunrise Studio, the biggest challenge is the workforce—or more accurately, the lack thereof.
“We have difficulty finding more workers now,” he said. Over the years, his factory has been able to recruit displaced workers from other NYC-based factories that have had to shutter. “But again, the skilled labor you’re talking about are 50 years old, plus quite a bit of them, they are around 60 years old. So, I don’t know how much longer we can survive with the age of the workers.”
Webber is facing the same challenges. “The general skills we’ve been teaching students are to source, not to make,” said Webber, who’s also an adjunct professor at St. John’s University.
Skills like sewing, cutting and patternmaking are sorely lacking today, and technology alone isn’t the answer. Even as more of the process becomes automated, those basic sewing and drafting skills remain the basis for operating the software effectively.
Government subsidized training is the key, she said—but it has to be deployed correctly. She can envision a program that places apprentices in established factories, pairing them with experienced workers. “The burden cannot be on independent businesses,” she said.
While Webber has been the recipient of what she calls “absolutely terrific” consulting resources through the manufacturing consulting organization ITAC and the New York City Economic Development Corporation, she doesn’t see the same type of resources geared toward the labor force. “Politicians want to feel like they can see the benefit of their money, but nobody wants to invest in people, and that’s always annoyed me.”
But why invest if Americans don’t want factory jobs? “I don’t believe that,” she said. “We saw from the last election, people are actually angry that they’re not being productive,” she said. “When you look at where the anger comes from, it’s exactly where the manufacturing ended. They’re not mad because they don’t want to manufacture. They’re mad because they don’t have a job.”
Bockoven agreed that the labor force could be there but he said, first U.S. citizens need to accept that ‘blue collar’ isn’t a pejorative. “The educational system [has been focused on] everybody should be trained for a four-year degree. Not everybody really should be,” he said. “There’s so much negativity around manufacturing. How do you turn that more positive?”
Lisa Morales-Hellebo, founder and managing general partner of supply chain investment fund Refashiond Ventures, said the U.S. has to sell it like it would any other concept. “The future of manufacturing needs a rebrand. It definitely is and should be a sexy tech job now,” she said. “You have so many kids that are into robotics and AI and systems design, but they don’t think of that as being applied to cut and sew factories or food production.”
To help young people understand the opportunities, Bockoven works in his community to expose middle schoolers to different industries that are an alternative to college that also offer good paying jobs.
In the meantime, America Knits found an eager labor pool when it opened in 2019. “We’re in a small town. There are no jobs here other than fast food or working in maybe healthcare or something like that. But some of these jobs you have to have some type of education or degree to do,” Hawkins said.
His factory, which primarily employs women, offers stable schedules that allow them to be home by the time their kids get off the school bus. Plus, it doesn’t fit the mold of a sweatshop that some might envision. “The apparel manufacturing business, it is really a very different business than it used to be in the old days,” he said. “We have a lot of cross training and a lot of automation. Plus, it’s a low-pressure environment.”
As a result, Hawkins has young people across product development, screen printing, laundry and embroidery who are excited about their jobs. And what 20-something wouldn’t like to ride a spreader that looks like a motorcycle for living?
That’s not to say Hawkin’s doesn’t see any labor-related concerns in the U.S. “There’s a middle management level of running apparel factories that is virtually non-existent now in our country.” It’s what would be necessary to open a host of new facilities, but he said those jobs moved overseas and the knowhow went with them.
5. Streamline immigration
“The way to jump start our particular industry would be—it’s kind of ironic to say it—but it would need to be fast tracking immigrant visas,” Hawkins said. “I could bring in enough people to outfit 100 factories.”
The immigrant population was always a big part of NY’s factory workforce, Chan said.
“If we can have immigrants like we used to have, we could train them to be semi-skilled workers. That might be one of the solutions.”
Despite the reality that immigrants play a vital role in the labor force across industries, it’s unlikely the current administration would support these efforts. Rather, President Trump’s focus seems to be on deportations. One report in The Washington Post stated that the administration’s goal is to deport one million immigrants this year alone. That may be unattainable, but the numbers show that arrests and detentions have increased.
6. Lean into existing infrastructure
For Morales-Hellebo, the Covid crisis underscored the need for the U.S. to protect and nurture the resources we already have here. “We need to designate certain existing infrastructure as critical to national security, getting them special tax incentive subsidies without them needing to jump through hoops to apply and do more homework to gain this recognition and status,” Morales-Hellebo said. This would include pharma, food, clothing and the military. “We have enough smart people in this country, where we can make those designations and then apply what they need into some sort of regulation or localized allocation of resources.”
She envisions an Office of Supply Chain, Infrastructure and Management overseeing this effort. “Then regional hubs could be optimized for specific uses,” she said, pointing to the Carolinas for textiles and cut and sew in Los Angeles, for instance.
“Tariffs may be some short-term relief [but] there’s what I call this constancy of purpose that we struggle with between one administration to the next.”
—Don Bockoven, Darling Fibers
The Tech Hubs Program through the U.S. Economic Development Administration has already laid the groundwork for some of this. In some cases, funding has even been allocated, she said, but that money hasn’t been deployed because there’s no plan. “All of these scattershot approaches to finding a pain and giving it some money and hoping that it’s going to piece together and create something that works is no longer viable,” she said.
In an ideal scenario, she’d like to see those resources go to early-stage founders and fund managers who understand what the supply chain of tomorrow should look like. This includes circularity so we’re no longer reliant on crops as feedstock—a major requirement as the impact of global warming worsens.
7. Be consistent
No matter how the government chooses to address the situation, Bockoven said the plan must be long term. “Tariffs may be some short-term relief [but] there’s what I call this constancy of purpose that we struggle with between one administration to the next,” he said. Contrast that with China. The Chinese have been focused and consistent on building out the entire supply chain, fueled by initiatives that run decades. “We don’t have that same vision here. And so, how do we compete?”
Bockoven points to the Manufacturing Voucher Program, through which states provide financial and training support to small-to-medium size companies. “It’s one of the few government programs I think that actually has a return on investment,” he said.
Despite running for 35 years, the program could now face the chopping block as a result of Project 2025 government spending scrutiny.
Maybe the best example of the stop/start nature of government action happened during the pandemic. Even before the coronavirus was contained, the U.S. government began pulling support for the industry. “The textile industry pivoted to make PPE. It spent money, invested and helped,” he said. “Within a year, we went back to buying them from China. So, we don’t learn our lesson sometimes.”
Worse still is the domino effect for those factories, said Morales-Hellebo. “Banks are now seeing 12 months of decreasing revenue because the government is pulling back their massive contracts, so then the banks are calling in their loans.” With cashflow tight, that could mean the end of businesses that have been around for a hundred years.
To Morales-Hellebo, the lack of consistency results from a lack of an overarching plan.
“The quickest win would be for the Defense Logistics Agency to be able to come up with a comprehensive strategy on supporting critical infrastructure, critical supplies, all the way back to the raw materials here in this country,” she said. “We need to find ways to support those existing industries that are at risk and give them long term, stable contracts that aren’t just impacting that one infrastructure, but all their dependency partners.”
8. Amend the Berry Amendment
Often when the subject of U.S. manufacturing comes up, so does the Berry Amendment, which mandates that if the Department of Defense is procuring goods in specific categories, including textiles and clothing, over a set threshold, it must give preference to domestic sources. Since 2018, that threshold has been $250,000, up from $150,000. “There’s always this push to move that threshold up, which just devastates the industry,” Bockoven said. “If we don’t protect some of the industry, our military will be outfitted by Chinese uniforms at some point in the future.”
Morales-Hellebo would like to see other changes related to the amendment. “The Berry Amendment is great, but we need to expand it to be looking at stability [instead of] just individual bids and contracts.”
Even as written, the Berry Amendment isn’t as effective as it could be for U.S.-based companies due to the preference system built into federal procurement law, Lamar said. “At the top of that preference pyramid is the federal prison factory system,” Lamar said, meaning prisons have first dibs on government contracts. “So, if we really want to get more U.S. manufacturing, we would reduce the U.S. government’s dependency on its forced labor prison factory system.”
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In the end, there are a lot of challenges to the U.S. textile and apparel industry that tariffs alone won’t solve. In fact, Chan said they’re causing “self-inflicted” harm–not just to the garment industry but the U.S. reputation in general.
“No matter what, nobody wins in this situation, not the U.S. citizen, not the Chinese, not EU citizens as well,” Chan said. From the international reaction thus far, Chan sees the country becoming siloed from its former allies.
Morales-Hellebo said including Canada and Mexico in the trade war ultimately only weakens the U.S.
“We have an unfair advantage with our massive, amazing partners to the north and south that other countries don’t have, and we should be leaning into that and how we can collaborate for mutual upside and advantage, especially in a time of war which we’re most certainly heading into with the increasing global conflicts,” she said.
Beyond the specter of war, Morales-Hellebo said climate change is a real and present danger that makes collaboration all the more necessary as natural resources become more scarce.
Webber agreed the U.S. can’t afford to be left out of international relationships. “I feel like the rest of the world is feeling like America doesn’t want to trade with them, and I hope that’s not the case, because trade is really, really important for every country.”
