27 companies, largest first.

About Apparel and Footwear Stocks

Apparel is a hits business pretending to be a consumer staple. Brand heat is real, it is worth an enormous premium while it lasts, and it is not permanent. Plenty of names in this group once traded at luxury multiples and now trade at liquidation ones, and the transition took a few seasons.

The strategic question everyone here is answering is wholesale against direct. Selling through department stores means lower prices but somebody else eats the unsold stock. Selling direct captures full price and the customer data, and hands back the markdown risk and the cost of running stores. Most brands have pushed toward direct, and the ones that pushed too fast discovered how much volume the wholesale channel was quietly carrying.

The off-price chains are the structural winners and rarely get discussed as such. Their supply is everyone else's mistakes, bought late and cheap, which means they do better precisely when the brands do worse. It is close to a natural hedge on the rest of the group. Inventory is the tell for everything here: stock growing faster than sales means discounts are coming.

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