Blanks and Wholesale Apparel: The Sourcing Economics Behind the Price List

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Almost everything written about blanks is written from the decorator's side of the counter: which brand feels nicest, which distributor ships fastest. This cluster is written from the sourcing side. Where does a blank actually come from, what did it cost to make before anyone marked it up, and at what order quantity does having your own garments made become cheaper than buying someone else's? That last question has an arithmetic answer, and it is on this page. Everything here connects to sourcing apparel direct from factories on one side and custom and decorated apparel manufacturing on the other.

What "blanks" means in apparel, and who actually buys them

Blanks are finished garments produced with no decoration on them: no print, no embroidery, no brand graphic. Many carry a tearaway neck label precisely so the buyer can remove it and sew in their own. The word is used interchangeably with blank apparel and blank clothing, and the sub-categories have their own names — blank tees, blank fleece, blank headwear — but the definition is the same in all of them. Terms are collected in the Yarnstick glossary of sourcing and trade terms.

Four kinds of buyer dominate the category:

• Decorators. Screen printers, embroiderers and DTG shops buying to order. They need availability and consistency, not differentiation, because their customer specified the garment.
• Print-on-demand and dropship platforms. The blank sits in a fulfilment warehouse and is decorated one piece at a time. Zero inventory risk, and zero control over the garment.
• Brands testing a market. A capsule of six designs on a stock blank tells you whether anyone wants the product before you commit to a dye lot.
• Brands whose margin cannot support development. Merch programmes, event apparel, uniform resellers, non-profits. The unit economics do not carry a $1,200 development bill and a 15-week lead time.

The honest framing for the whole cluster: buying blanks and having garments made are two ends of one decision. Blanks are faster, lower risk and lower margin, and give you no differentiation whatsoever — your competitor can buy the identical garment tomorrow. Custom production is slower, carries a real minimum, and is the only way to own fit, fabric weight and fibre. Neither is the smart choice in general. One of them is the smart choice for your quantity and price point.

The supply chain behind a blank, and why the wholesale price is not the mill price

A blank is not made by a special kind of factory. It comes off the same circular knitting machines and the same cut-and-sew lines that produce branded retail product, frequently in the same industrial clusters. What differs is the route to you.

1. Spinner and mill. Yarn is spun, knitted into jersey or fleece, dyed and finished. Fabric is where most of the cost sits — 51 percent of FOB on a basic tee.
2. Cut-and-sew factory. The garment is cut, sewn, trimmed, pressed and packed. Origin for duty purposes is the cut-and-sew country under 19 CFR 102.21, regardless of where the fabric came from.
3. The blank brand, acting as importer of record. It buys FOB, ships, clears customs, pays duty and holds the goods in US warehouses.
4. The distributor. A national wholesaler carrying dozens of blank brands, holding regional inventory and shipping to decorators, often overnight.
5. You.

Two consequences fall out of that chain, and neither is usually stated.

The wholesale price contains at least two margins over the FOB price — the blank brand's and the distributor's. Neither is disclosed, and at case quantities neither is negotiable. You are looking at a number that has already passed through an import, a warehouse, a sales force and a next-day delivery promise.

The duty was paid on their FOB, not on your wholesale price. US duty is assessed on the entered value of the goods — the price paid to the foreign seller — not on the resale price. A blanks importer buying well under $2 a tee pays 16.5 percent MFN plus the applicable Section 301 forced-labor rate on that number, and the domestic mark-up added afterwards is not dutiable at all. When you import your own production at $4.30 FOB, you pay the same percentage on a much larger base. Duty is not a fixed handicap here; it is a handicap proportional to how efficiently the goods were bought.

The channel is large and consolidating. Wearables and apparel were the single biggest product category in US promotional product distributor sales in 2024, at 26.6 percent of $26.78 billion, per PPAI's Sales Volume Report. In October 2024 S&S Activewear closed its acquisition of alphabroder, combining two of only three suppliers with annual sales above $2 billion — what PPAI called the most substantial example of the industry's consolidation. Fewer, larger distributors means better fill rates and less price competition at the counter.

The tiers of the blanks market, from commodity to premium

Blank apparel splits into four price tiers, and the tier — not the brand — determines what you can expect. Wholesale price examples are from a US distributor's published listings, accessed 16 August 2026, and move with cotton and freight.

The jump from commodity to mid retail is mostly a yarn decision. Ring-spun yarn costs 20–30 percent more than open-end, and combing removes 12–20 percent of the fibre by weight as noil before you start. Those two choices, not the label, are what you feel. The mechanics are in why apparel MOQs are set by dye lots and in the tee-specific detail on how to read a blank tee spec and its wholesale price ladder.

What you can and cannot change about a blank

What a blanks programme lets you control, versus what only custom production lets you control.

Read that table as a decision rule. If everything you want to change sits in the top three rows, blanks are correct and custom production would be an expensive way to arrive at the same garment. If anything you want to change sits in the bottom five, no amount of negotiating with a distributor will get it.

The crossover: buying blanks at wholesale versus running your own production

Here is the arithmetic the rest of the internet leaves out. We will cost a single style — a 180 gsm combed cotton single jersey crew tee — produced in India and landed at a US distribution centre, at five order quantities, and compare it against the wholesale price of a comparable blank.

The production side uses Yarnstick's canonical cost sheet: $4.30 FOB, built from 0.27 kg of finished dyed jersey at about $8.15/kg, $0.45 of trims and packaging, 10 minutes of sewing at $0.08 a minute, factory overhead and margin. Duty as of 16 August 2026 is 16.5 percent MFN on HTS 6109.10.00 plus a 10 percent Section 301 forced-labor tariff for India, a combined 26.5 percent on entered value. Verify both against the current HTSUS before you rely on them.

Full landed-cost build for 5,000 pieces, one style, one colour, India to a US East Coast DC, non-peak ocean freight.

Now run the same build at five quantities. Below roughly 1,000 pieces in a custom colour you sit under the dye-lot minimum, so a 20 percent below-minimum premium is applied to FOB, within the 15–30 percent range factories typically charge. The Merchandise Processing Fee minimum of $33.58 per entry for FY2026 binds at the two smallest quantities.

Landed cost per unit for a custom 180 gsm cotton tee, by order quantity, India origin, as of 16 August 2026.

The shape of that curve is the whole story. Fixed costs — development, broker, ISF, bond, inspection, delivery, insurance — total $2,895 and divide away as quantity rises. Everything else scales linearly. Add up the linear terms and you get the number that matters:

$4.300 FOB + $0.450 freight + $0.710 MFN duty + $0.430 Section 301 duty + $0.015 MPF + $0.005 HMF = $5.910 per unit.

That $5.91 is a floor. It is what your tee costs landed at infinite volume. No order size gets under it, because nothing left in it is a fixed cost. Which gives a one-line test: any blank priced below $5.91 wholesale can never be beaten by having the same garment made, at any quantity. That is why commodity blanks at $2.36 are not a pricing failure on your part — they are the output of a supply chain buying at a scale and a yarn spec you are not buying at, and paying duty on a correspondingly smaller base.

Where custom production does win is against premium blanks. Setting the landed cost equal to a blank's wholesale price and solving for quantity:

Break-even order quantity at which custom production undercuts a blank, by the blank's wholesale price.

Read down that column and the strategy writes itself. If you are buying commodity blanks, stay. If you are buying premium blanks at $8 to $10 because you need weight and hand-feel, you cross over at somewhere between 700 and 1,400 units of one style in one colour — and on the other side of that line you own the fit, the fabric and the fibre instead of renting them. Detail on the premium end sits in garment-dyed blanks and why they cost more and blank apparel brands compared on spec.

What the crossover arithmetic does not price

Four things sit outside the table, and all four favour blanks. Say so before you switch.

Lead time. Wholesale blank clothing ships from US inventory, frequently next day. A first custom order runs 15 to 20 weeks from purchase order to a US DC for India, or 10 to 16 weeks to FOB before ocean transit and clearance. Repeat orders compress to 8 to 12 weeks to FOB. That is a working-capital difference, not just a calendar one.

Cash and inventory risk. A wholesale blank apparel purchase is bought against demand you have already seen. A production order is bought against demand you have forecast, months out, in a size curve you had to guess. The full break-even shifts against custom production every time you write off unsold units.

Customs exposure. Buying blanks domestically is a domestic purchase. Importing your own production makes you the importer of record, with entry, valuation, classification, cotton-traceability and forced-labor obligations attached to your name. Those are manageable, and they are not free. Start at landed cost for apparel imports.

Colour count. The $5.91 floor assumes one colour. Split 1,200 units across three custom colours and you pay three dye-lot minimums, which can add several dollars a unit on its own. That mechanism is the subject of why apparel MOQs are set by dye lots.

The rest of this cluster

Seven pages sit under this one:

• How to read a blank tee spec and its wholesale price ladder — GSM, yarn count, side seams, fit blocks, and why white is priced differently from colours.
• Blank hoodies and sweatshirts, fleece construction and cost — French terry against brushed fleece, the 280 to 400+ gsm ladder, and why a hoodie costs two to three times a tee.
• Blank polos, sweaters and pullovers — piqué construction, collar quality and knit gauge.
• How to evaluate a wholesale clothing supplier — distributor versus importer versus factory.
• Buying apparel in bulk without overbuying — case packs, size curves and the arithmetic of a first buy.
• Blank apparel brands compared on spec — weight, yarn, construction and fit block, side by side.
• Garment-dyed blanks and why they cost more — the dye method behind the premium end of the market.

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