RESHORING AND NEARSHORING STRATEGIES IN THE APPAREL INDUSTRY: A PRISMA-INFORMED STRUCTURED NARRATIVE REVIEW OF SUPPLY CHAIN RESILIENCE (2015–2025)

Abstract

After decades of shifting apparel manufacturing to low-cost regions, fashion companies and textile supply chains have been reassessing this strategy in the face of logistical disruptions, tariff volatility, geopolitical risks, and domestic regulatory pressures. This article presents a structured narrative review, informed by the principles of the PRISMA protocol (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses), on reshoring (the return of production to the country of origin) and nearshoring (relocation to geographically nearby regions) in the apparel industry, focusing on the factors driving these decisions and the operational and financial outcomes reported. Open-access academic search engines, institutional repositories, and bibliographic aggregators were consulted — since direct access to the proprietary interfaces of databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, and Business Source Complete was not available at the time this article was prepared — supplemented by public policy documents used as contextual material and clearly distinguished from peer-reviewed academic literature. The process resulted in a corpus of only ten core academic studies, published mostly between 2013 and 2026. This is a small and methodologically heterogeneous sample base, which limits the generalizability of the findings, precludes statistical meta-analysis, and should be read as a preliminary qualitative synthesis, not as conclusive evidence. Screening and selection of studies were conducted by a single reviewer (the author), without independent checking by a second assessor — a limitation that qualifies the robustness of the selection process and is detailed in Section 6. The results indicate that reshoring/nearshoring decisions in the apparel sector are rarely driven by a single factor: sourcing process complexity, environmental sustainability, tariff exposure, market response speed, and adoption of automation technologies appear recurrently as interrelated drivers, while domestic labor cost, regional textile infrastructure shortages, and lack of skilled labor remain the main barriers. Evidence on direct financial outcomes, meanwhile, is scarce and inconsistent, in contrast to operational benefits, which are relatively better documented. The article discusses the practical implications of this evidence for small and medium-sized apparel companies in the United States and points to gaps for future research.