Hosiery

Hosiery in Yiwu: where the category is traded, what to check before you order, and the mistakes buyers make.

Hosiery in Yiwu: the wholesale floor and what lies behind it

Hosiery has floor 1 of International Trade City District 4 to itself, inside a district of more than 16,000 booths opened in 2008. The official floor plan puts socks alone on that floor, with day-to-day goods, gloves and hats on floor 2.

Socks are a simple product to compare and a difficult one to source well, because the visible differences are small and the cost differences are in yarn, knit and finishing.

What to check before you order

Ask for the yarn composition, the knit gauge and the size run as a table, not as free sizes. A size run you can compare across suppliers is the single most useful thing to collect on the floor.

Ask where the knitting happens. The market floor is the trading point, and some stalls sell goods knitted in the surrounding belt rather than in their own workshop, which is normal but changes how you talk about lead time.

Where the mistakes happen

Elastic and yarn quality show up only after wear, so a sample handled in the shop tells you little. Test a few pairs after a full wash cycle before you commit a container.

The second trap is counting by pair rather than by carton, which makes a short delivery easy to hide. Count at packing and record it.

We do not publish per-stall prices. Ask each supplier for the unit price at three quantities and at the same specification, and treat any level quoted on this page as a starting point for negotiation rather than a market rate.

Product categories are maintained by us as a taxonomy; they are not a claim about any factory's certification or capacity.