The share of US fashion brands actively diversifying sourcing, year over year.
A 2026 USFIA benchmarking study, produced with the University of Delaware, points to a shift in strategy: only 58% of US fashion brands are now actively diversifying sourcing, down from 83% the year before. More companies are instead consolidating around fewer, more capable vendors as they adapt to sustained tariff uncertainty.
The logic makes sense on paper: fewer vendor relationships are easier to manage, easier to audit deeply, and easier to build real partnership with. But it also raises the stakes considerably. If a brand is now depending on three strong factories instead of eight adequate ones, a single quality failure or compliance lapse does proportionally more damage — both to the shipment and to the relationship.
That's the trade-off worth sitting with: consolidation concentrates risk as much as it concentrates capability. Brands making this shift should be pairing it with more rigorous, more frequent verification of the vendors they're keeping, not less — precisely because there's no longer a deep bench of backups if one of them falters.
Want the monthly version of insights like this? Subscribe to the QIV Insight.