Right now, somewhere in Tiruppur, a knitting machine is finishing its ten-thousandth cotton t-shirt of the shift — and a sourcing manager in Ohio is deciding whether the next container comes from India, Vietnam, or Bangladesh. That single decision, multiplied across thousands of buyers, is redrawing the entire apparel map. The orders are moving. The only question is whether you can see where.
For decades the cotton t-shirt was the dullest, most predictable line item in global trade. Not anymore. Tariffs, tariff threats, and a frantic scramble to diversify away from China have turned the humble knitted t-shirt — HS code 6109 — into one of the most fought-over categories on the planet. If you make cotton garments and you're still finding buyers by attending two trade shows a year, you are bringing a fax machine to a knife fight.
The 30-second version
- Tiruppur's knitwear exports hit a record ₹40,000 crore (~$4.7B) in FY24-25, up 20% — India's knitwear capital riding the China exit.
- India's total textile & apparel exports hit an all-time-high $37.7 billion in FY25, with readymade garments alone at ~$16 billion.
- US apparel imports from India jumped ~16% in Jan-Aug 2025 while imports from China fell more than 25% — a once-in-a-generation reshuffle.
- Cotton t-shirts alone are a $35.8 billion global export market — 69% of every t-shirt shipped worldwide.
- The US buys roughly $12 billion of t-shirts a year and the EU imports $92.56 billion of apparel total — the buyers are real, named, and shippable.
The great apparel reshuffle is happening right now
Start with the number that should make every t-shirt manufacturer sit up. In the first eight months of 2025, US apparel imports climbed to roughly $53 billion — but the story isn't the total, it's the redistribution underneath it. Imports from Vietnam rose almost 16%, Bangladesh nearly 20%, and India around 16%, while Chinese apparel shipments to the US collapsed by more than 25%. Vietnam alone now ships over $11 billion of clothing to America; India sat near $6.2 billion through July.
That decline didn't evaporate. It moved. Every percentage point China loses is a purchase order looking for a new factory floor — in Tiruppur, in Dhaka, in Hanoi. The 2025 tariff whiplash made it messier: Washington cut Bangladesh's rate to 20% while raising India's to 25%, sending buyers re-running their sourcing math overnight. The takeaway for any exporter: the buyer who placed an order in China last year is, statistically, shopping right now. You either know who they are or you don't.
The cotton t-shirt didn't get more interesting. The map underneath it did — and the exporters reading that map are eating the lunch of the ones still cold-emailing into the void.
Tiruppur: the $4.7 billion knitwear engine
No cluster captures the moment better than Tiruppur, India's knitwear capital. Knitwear exports from the city hit a record ₹40,000 crore in FY24-25, a jump of about 20%, with roughly 45% headed to Europe and 30% to the US. Pull the lens back and the picture is just as bullish: India's textile and apparel exports reached an all-time-high of $37.7 billion in FY25, with readymade garments alone near $16 billion.
This is exactly where ShipScout shines — not selling anyone's domestic records, but helping exporters in Tiruppur, Ludhiana, or Dhaka find the buyers abroad who are importing their kind of product, and grow exports into them. The factory capacity in India is already world-class. The missing piece has always been demand visibility: which importer in Düsseldorf or Dallas is actually placing polo shirts and cotton t-shirts orders this quarter, and how big.
Why HS code 6109 is the line to watch
HS code 6109 — knitted or crocheted t-shirts, singlets, and vests — is the beating heart of the t-shirt trade. Globally it's a $40 billion-plus export category, and cotton t-shirts make up the lion's share at $35.8 billion, about 69% of every t-shirt shipped in 2024. China and Bangladesh dominate the top of the table at roughly $8.6 billion each, with Vietnam, India, Pakistan, and Turkey filling out the leaderboard.
India's slice is growing fast: t-shirt exports rose 12% in 2024 to about $2.3 billion, with cotton accounting for roughly 70% of the mix. If you produce knitted t-shirts or readymade garments, 6109 is the exact code you should be tracking your competitors and target buyers under — because every customs record on the import side carries it.
Where the buyers actually are
Forget vague TAM slides. The garment importers are concentrated and knowable. The US absorbs around $12 billion of t-shirts a year, overwhelmingly cotton, from Asia and Central America. Across the Atlantic, EU apparel imports totaled $92.56 billion in 2024, with Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the UK as the heavyweight destinations. India itself supplied about $4.52 billion of that EU apparel demand — room to triple.
So the buyer geography is settled: the US is the #1 prize, the EU is a $90B-plus pool, and the UK is a high-value English-language entry point. The exporters winning right now aren't guessing at these markets — they're reading the import records, ranking the buyers by volume, and walking into negotiations already knowing who buys what.
How to find t-shirt and garment buyers with ShipScout
This is where global trade data stops being a report and starts being a pipeline. ShipScout indexes 11 billion-plus shipment records across 240+ countries — US, EU, and UK import data included — so you can go from "I make cotton t-shirts" to "here are the 50 importers I should email this week" in an afternoon.
1. Find buyers by HS code
Search HS code 6109 against US, EU, and UK import records and instantly surface every company importing knitted t-shirts and polo shirts. No more guessing which brands source from your region — you see the actual consignees. Start on the companies database and filter by product code.
2. Pull an importer list ranked by volume
Don't waste a quarter chasing a buyer who imports one container a year. ShipScout ranks garment importers by shipment volume, so you prioritize the whales first. Browse importers by destination — buyers in the USA, the UK, or Germany — and sort to put the highest-volume apparel buyers at the top of your call list.
3. Vet suppliers and partners
Sourcing yarn, buying greige, or scouting a manufacturing partner in India's textile clusters? Use the same records in reverse to verify that a supplier actually ships what they claim, at the volume they claim, before you wire a deposit.
4. Track competitors in real time
Watch which buyers your rivals in Tiruppur, Dhaka, or Vietnam are shipping to, spot a competitor's account that's gone quiet, and time your pitch for the exact moment a buyer is diversifying. As the China-to-India-and-Vietnam shift accelerates, competitor intelligence is the difference between catching the wave and reading about it later.
You don't need a $20,000 ImportGenius or Panjiva contract to do any of this. ShipScout was built as the affordable alternative — same depth of global shipment records, a fraction of the price. Start a free trial and run your first HS 6109 buyer search before your competitor finishes their morning coffee.
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