Everyone reacts differently to uncertainty. Some hunker down, clutching their spreadsheets like lifeboats. Others grab their checkbooks, buying competitors as if they were stocking up on storm supplies. In today’s uniform and workwear market, there’s no single correct move—only the shared challenge of steering through murky waters where tariffs, supply chains, labor, and soft demand all jostle for the wheel. The goal, as always, is to play the long game without fumbling the short-term profits that keep the lights on.
Standing Still: The Wait-and-See Strategy
Across the U.S. and Canada, many companies have chosen the “freeze tag” approach to business: nobody’s hiring, nobody’s firing, and everyone is waiting for someone—anyone—to call “all clear.” Canadian job vacancies slid to an eight-year low by mid-2025, a sure sign that businesses prefer attrition over pink slips. In the U.S., Federal Reserve surveys echo the same cautious hum: don’t expand, don’t contract, just keep paddling until the economic fog thins.
Executives aren’t shy about their reasoning. “If you don’t know what next quarter looks like,” one Canadian staffing pro explained, “why would you risk adding cost?” That attitude has permeated the uniform space, where clients like public safety agencies, hotels, food service firms, and manufacturers are stretching their uniform replacement cycles a little longer, deferring new program launches, and generally keeping their wallets close to their chests.
Tariffs, Trade Tangles, and the Price of Pants
If business thrives on certainty, 2025 has been the opposite of a spa day. Tariffs have become the industry’s favorite four-letter word. Policy brinkmanship with China, Canada, and Mexico means no one knows if tomorrow’s shipment of cotton shirts will cost the same as today’s. And tariffs, as one weary manufacturer quipped, are “little more than taxes passed on to the end user.” Translation: if fabric costs spike, so will uniform prices, and no one wants to explain that to a school district, a hotel chain, or a police department already under budget pressure.
Uniform rental trends confirm the unease. A joint survey by Baird and TRSA found the rental business tipping into negative territory in late 2024, its first downturn since the pandemic rebound. Healthcare and linen services held steady (nurses need scrubs no matter what the Fed says), but industrial uniform volumes flattened like a well-worn pair of coveralls.
Supply Chains: The Global Roller Coaster
Let’s not forget the shipping side of the saga. Between pandemic hangovers, geopolitical dust-ups, and raw material spikes, uniform suppliers have lived through enough surprises to make a magician blush. The result: companies hedging their bets with diversified sourcing—hello Vietnam, hello India—and building buffer inventories for critical clients. Sensible moves, yes, but they also tie up cash, leaving less room for risk-taking elsewhere.
Nobody wants to be the distributor who bets big on an order, only to watch tariffs turn the margin into confetti. So the cautious mood lingers, with many firms operating in a holding pattern: steady, reliable, and very careful not to step on any economic rakes.
Mergers, Acquisitions, and Bold Gambits
And yet, amid all this caution, a parallel storyline unfolds. Call it the Optimist’s Playbook: if times are tough, buy your way into tomorrow.
Galls has been especially active, expanding into Canada by acquiring Uniform Works in 2025, strengthening its reach across police, fire, and EMS markets. GME Supply snapped up Wayne Enterprises this year to beef up its oil, gas, and utilities portfolio. Even Bluestar Alliance got into the game, taking Dickies® off VF Corporation’s hands for a cool $600 million, betting that an iconic workwear brand still has runway to grow.
These deals are not the moves of pessimists. They’re wagers that uniforms, like gravity, remain inevitable. As long as workers clock in, uniforms will be needed—and the companies with scale, capital, and guts want to make sure they own a larger slice of that future.
Balancing the See-Saw
So here we are, straddling a see-saw: on one end, caution and frozen hiring; on the other, consolidation and bold acquisitions. Neither side is wrong. Both are strategies for surviving uncertainty. But the underlying truth is this: the need for uniforms does not vanish, even if demand takes a nap.
The clever players know the trick is to juggle both realities—to optimize for today’s shaky environment without losing sight of tomorrow’s growth. Whether that means stockpiling fabric, freezing headcount, or buying your neighbor’s shop, the real winners will be those who keep their eyes on the long game.
After all, this business has weathered tariffs, wars, recessions, and pandemics. The uniform industry has always been less about fashion and more about function: people still need to look the part, whether they’re patrolling a street, running a factory floor, or greeting hotel guests. That steady truth is why even in uncertain times, the market keeps its uniforms pressed and its strategies sharp.
