The Tamesis
“India is one of the few countries that can offer scale, variety and fiber depth all at once,” said Vincent Quan, professor of fashion business management at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). “It is unlikely to completely replace any single buying center, but it is becoming increasingly important as part of a diversified portfolio.”
Rita McGrath, a management professor at Columbia Business School, said the long-established “China plus one” strategy is quickly evolving into “China plus three or four,” as the need to diversify applies to every sourcing center — not just China.
Limits of tariff reductions
However, tariffs are just one variable in an increasingly complex procurement equation. Infrastructure bottlenecks, port congestion, inland transport costs and audit fatigue remain ongoing challenges.
“Logistics in India has always been a challenge, and customers experience more friction than in other Asian sourcing hubs,” said Margaret Bishop, an assistant professor at Parsons School of Design and an expert in textile supply chain management. Dr. Sheng Lu, chair of the Department of Fashion and Apparel Studies at the University of Delaware, added that today’s apparel purchasing decisions are driven not just by cost but by broader considerations, including speed to market, flexibility and compliance.
For a brand, it’s not so much a missed opportunity as a misreading of its longevity. The past year has highlighted how quickly trading conditions can change and how easy it is to amend or reverse announced deals. “Tariffs are used as a political pressure tool,” said Achim Berg, founder of FashionSights, an industry think tank. “It’s very volatile, it’s hard to predict and it’s not necessarily driven solely by economic factors.”
This volatility has a chilling effect on long-term investing. Brands are increasingly reluctant to make large, fixed commitments to new sourcing countries without confidence in policy stability. Instead, flexibility has become the dominant strategy.
Wider geopolitical evolution
The U.S.-India deal fits into a broader pattern of bilateral transactional trade negotiations that are reshaping global supply chains. Multilateral agreements involving the United States are largely off the table, while existing agreements are increasingly considered likely to change.
“This reflects a fundamental shift in the way the U.S. trades with emerging manufacturing markets,” said Greg Husisian, partner at Foley & Lardner. “Tolerating trade deficits is no longer seen as advancing broader foreign policy goals.”
“The old way of building long-term strategies around stable trading regimes has been broken,” McGrath said. “The winners will be those who remain selective and able to reconfigure quickly when circumstances change.”
India’s growing role as a trading partner provides clues about how global competitive advantage is shifting. As McGrath describes it, this is a textbook example of “temporary advantage”—the result of narrow windows of relative positioning rather than long-term hegemony.
The newly announced 18% tariff brings the U.S. tariffs on Indian clothing to just below the 20% imposed on Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. At the same time, India now enjoys preferential or improved access to three of the world’s largest apparel markets – the US, EU and UK – that few sourcing countries can currently match. That advantage is amplified by instability elsewhere: Bangladesh, India’s closest rival in low-cost apparel, is grappling with daily power outages, political unrest and factory closures that have disrupted production and shaken buyer confidence.
McGrath believes the most important thing is not any single data point, but how purchasing decisions are made now. The criteria that once dominated supplier selection—price, quality, and quantity—no longer operate in isolation. “Clients are looking for flexibility and the ability to react immediately to an ever-changing competitive environment,” she said. “That’s the nature of competitive advantage today: It’s situational, contingent, and constantly changing.”
