Sell excess apparel and clothing inventory

What clothing can I get an offer on?

We make offers on women's, men's and kids' apparel, intimates and sleepwear, activewear, accessories, and mixed apparel by the pound. Sources include past-season stock, factory overruns, canceled purchase orders, shelf pulls from store resets, e-commerce returns and samples. Garments can come on hangers, folded in polybags, in prepacked cartons or loose in gaylords.

In apparel the same piece count can be worth very different money. Two lots of identical shirts are not worth the same if one has a balanced size scale and retail tickets and the other is all XXL, unticketed and loose.

Intimates, swimwear and sleepwear carry an extra rule: buyers want them new and sealed, because returned or tried-on underwear and swimwear cannot be resold hygienically in most markets. Keep those lines in their original packs and list returns of them separately. Activewear behaves more like footwear: brand and size run drive it, and athletic brands are among the strictest about online resale.

How does the season change what my apparel is worth?

Clothing ages on two clocks: the weather and the trend. Weather is predictable. Heavy coats, fleece and knitwear sell to resellers ahead of autumn; swimwear, shorts and tees ahead of spring. Trend is less forgiving. A basic white tee is nearly timeless. A print, a graphic or a cut that defined one season looks older every month.

Practical rule: sell trend and fashion pieces as soon as you know they will not sell through at your own price. Hold basics only if storage is cheap and you are sure of next season's demand. Resellers buy ahead of the season they sell into, so the best time to offer fall and winter goods is well before the weather turns, and spring and summer goods while stores are still planning those floors. Offering coats once stores are already marking coats down means competing with their clearance.

Condition and packing tiers we use for apparel

Packing matters as much as condition. Hanging garments in wardrobe boxes or on GOH (garment on hanger) suit off-price stores, which can put them straight out. Polybagged folded goods in master cartons suit most resellers and ship densely. Loose bulk in gaylords suits by-the-pound buyers and exporters. Mention hangers, since some buyers want them and others pay to throw them away.

What lowers an apparel offer?

• Size scale missing the middle sizes
• Mixed seasons and genders in one carton with no breakdown
• Another retailer's private label or price tickets on the goods, with a requirement to remove them
• Visible defects: stains, pulls, missing buttons, broken zippers
• Odor or moisture from poor storage
• Licensed graphics where the license has ended (resale may be restricted)
• Very small quantities per style spread across many styles

What raises it: deep quantity per style, balanced sizes, core colors, current season, retail tickets on, and clean master cartons with packing lists.

Brand protection: labels, tickets and channels

Apparel brands worry about two things: their goods on a marketplace below their price, and their label in a store they do not want to be in. The usual tools:

1. Channel restriction. No online, export only, or excluded countries. See how no-online and export-only restrictions work.
2. De-labeling. Cut or mark the brand label. Keep fiber content, country of origin and care labels; U.S. textile labeling rules enforced by the Federal Trade Commission expect them on the garment.
3. Ticket removal. Take off your retail tickets so the reseller sets their own price without showing yours.

Each option has a cost in labor or buyer pool. Who does the work, where, and who pays for it is agreed per deal, so raise it in your first message rather than after an offer is made. A condition that only appears at pickup usually means re-pricing the lot.

The apparel offer checklist

Send what you have; the first three items matter most.

• Style number, description, gender and category (tops, bottoms, outerwear, intimates)
• Size breakdown per style (by size, or as a size ratio if packed in prepacks)
• Season and year of the style
• Retail price per piece, and whether tickets are attached
• Fiber content (cotton, polyester, wool, blends) for buyers who sort by fabric
• Packing: on hanger, folded and polybagged, or loose; pieces per carton
• Condition per line, with returns separated
• Photos: a garment laid flat, the label, the ticket, an open carton, the stacked pallet
• Carton and pallet counts, location, dock access
• Label, ticket and channel conditions you need

If the goods are an overseas factory's canceled order sitting in a US warehouse, include the packing list from the shipment. It usually already has the size ratio per carton.

Mistakes we see with clothing lots

• Sending only a total piece count with no size breakdown
• Describing a mixed-season lot as current season
• Letting goods sit damp in a trailer or container, which leaves odor buyers can smell on opening
• Mixing used returns into new cartons
• Forgetting that the buyer needs to know about security tags still on garments
• Waiting a full year to see whether a trend comes back

A worked example

For illustration only, not market data: an importer has a canceled order of women's knit tops sitting in a warehouse, several thousand pieces across a handful of styles, folded and polybagged, packed in prepacked cartons with a fixed size ratio. The tops carry the canceled retailer's private-label neck label. Tickets are not attached.

An offer on a lot like this usually comes as two options. Export only with labels left on keeps handling low, so it tends to price higher. Domestic resale with labels cut adds labor per piece, and that cost comes off the price. The importer chooses the trade-off: protecting the retailer relationship at home, or keeping more of the money.

If your stock is lower grade or mixed, read how merchandise by the pound is sold. Buyers can find clothing loads under wholesale closeout apparel. Footwear that came in with the same order can travel on the same truck; see selling excess footwear. To start, send your packing list and photos through the offer form here.