The Bale Equivalence of US Apparel and Home Furnishing Imports

The mission of Cotton Incorporated is to promote cotton through research and promotion. From a market research perspective, these two objectives can go hand-in-hand, where findings involving apparel and home textiles can be used to guide the development of products that can be used to increase the demand and profitability of cotton. An example of such market research is the recent development an import database that describe the imports of apparel and home textiles in terms of bale equivalence at the most detailed ten-digit harmonized tariff system (HTS) level. This database can be used to identify opportunities and threats relative to end-use demand of cotton in the world’s largest apparel market. The descriptive statistics presented in this research provide an overview of the composition of U.S. apparel imports in bale equivalence terms, identifying key product categories that could be targeted to increase end-use consumption in the U.S.