Import tariffs on apparel have been among the highest of any sector for decades, and the domestic share of clothing production has barely moved.
That tension grew louder in 2025, as sweeping tariff increases have reignited talk of a domestic manufacturing renaissance.
In April 2025, the American Apparel & Footwear Association pointed out that apparel tariffs were already averaging 14.6% in 2024, nearly three times the 5% average levied on steel, and yet the share of clothing actually made in the US sat at roughly 3%.
The policy lever has been pulled repeatedly. The results have been underwhelming.
You Can’t Tariff Your Way to a Skilled Workforce
The workforce problem is older than the current tariff debate, and far harder to fix.
US apparel manufacturing employment has collapsed from around 900,000 workers in 1990 to roughly 70,000 today, a 92% decline according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The people with hands-on garment-making knowledge are retiring and aging out of the force, and very few are coming up behind them. “A lot of people aren’t going to school to learn how to become a seamstress, Benjamin Massing, owner at The Massing Group, explains. “Many of the aspects that make for a truly great seamstress are taught at a young age from parents and generations in the business, and time becomes the biggest opposition as younger generations of adults look for opportunity elsewhere in completely different fields.”
“You have dye houses closing, you have screen printers closing along side cut & sew factories, you have all these places closing,” he adds, and while he acknowledges that consolidation sends more work toward well-run operations like his, he’s clear that for the health of the wider industry, it’s a troubling sign.
Sewn in America, Stuck in the Past
Even where the workforce exists, the mindset often doesn’t.
Most garment facilities in Los Angeles are run by skilled laborers more so than businesspeople. The craft knowledge is there. The operational thinking rarely follows.
“A lot of the time these factories here are not really run by people who have the business acumen to properly create an infrastructure to last,” says Benjamin Massing, who identified this gap early while building The Massing Group. “They are run by people who are very skilled laborers most of the time.”
Skilled laborers keep the machines they know running, work with the vendors they’ve always used, and optimise for the job in front of them.
A business operator thinks in systems, where are the bottlenecks, what technology could replace a manual step, which vendor relationship is the slowest point in the relay race.
“I’m constantly looking for new technology that I can add and I can implement. I’m constantly trying to figure out if there are processes that I can automate, if there are ways that I can ensure better quality,” Massing says.
He describes making recent major machinery investments to keep pace with what international facilities produce, the standard he’s measuring against is a global one.
The logic is simple Quality and capability have to justify the domestic price premium, and that only happens through continuous capital investment, not through policy protection alone.
Stitch by Stitch, Here’s What a Rebuild Actually Looks Like
The case for domestic garment manufacturing has nothing to do with sentiment. It’s operational.
The Massing Group was built around that gap. Institutional knowledge under one roof, structured as a retainer model that most brands couldn’t afford to replicate independently.
That structure creates something tariffs can’t: momentum.
Massing uses the word specifically about what kills brands during development, the point where founders lose months, then lose heart.
“For me, momentum is everything. Momentum is the driver when you’re building a business. If you lose the momentum, it is so hard to get that back.”
Tariffs make the economics of domestic production more attractive. They don’t make the operators appear.
The rebuild, if it happens, will be earned through investment, systems, and the kind of knowledge that can’t be legislated into existence.
“I think that a few will rise to the top,” Massing says, “and I think that work will follow into those spaces.”
