German Fashion Industry Statistics

Germany's fashion consumer is a walking contradiction: buying about 60 new garments a year and keeping them around three years, increasingly demanding sustainability, local production and credible labels and even trying second‑hand or rental models, researching and buying online and on mobile and favoring socially minded brands, while two thirds remain price‑driven, nearly half of online orders are returned mostly due to fit, and a quarter mistrust personalized recommendations.

Germany's online fashion market has become a well-tailored runway, with 48 million shoppers and fashion making up about a quarter of e-commerce as Zalando and Amazon steer a marketplace-driven landscape where free shipping, click-and-collect and customer reviews are routine, mobile commerce is rapidly scaling, social and cross-border channels claim about 15 to 16 percent, and flashier innovations like virtual try-on and subscription boxes remain niche.

With about 124,000 employees across roughly 1,400 firms, nearly 90 percent of them SMEs, Germany's fashion industry cleverly stitches together big brands and regional hubs with strong technical textile and machinery expertise, leans female in manufacturing, invests in research, development and apprenticeships, experiments selectively with 3D prototyping, yet quietly faces a modest decline in physical apparel sites even as retail and event-driven jobs keep hundreds of thousands working.

Think of Germany's fashion market as a powerhouse stitching together more than US$70 billion in revenue in 2024, led by women's apparel at about US$37.9 billion and men's at roughly US$22.7 billion, with footwear at US$14.8 billion and sneakers at US$3.2 billion, sportswear topping 10 billion euros, children's wear near US$7.5 billion and luxury at US$4.6 billion, while lingerie, accessories and hosiery contribute over 3 billion euros, about US$3.8 billion and US$1.5 billion respectively, technical textiles make up roughly a quarter to a third of turnover, workwear adds close to 1 billion euros, the wider textile and fashion turnover is around 28 billion euros with clothing industry turnover near 6.5 billion euros, household spending averages 900 to 1,000 euros annually, the market is forecast to grow about 2 to 3 percent annually through 2027, and high-growth niches such as second-hand and sustainable fashion are surging at nearly 20 percent and in double-digit rates year on year.

Germany's fashion sector looks more like a global stylist than a self-sufficient atelier: as the world's second-largest exporter and a logistics hub that re-exports roughly 40 percent of shipments, it still imports about 40 billion euros of clothing while exporting around 26 billion euros and running a roughly 14 billion euro trade deficit, sourcing most garments from China (about 23 percent) with Bangladesh and Turkey also key suppliers and Vietnam and Cambodia rising, relying on Italy for over 2 billion euros of high-end textiles, sending much of its output to Poland, Switzerland and France, exporting some 3 billion euros of technical textiles and about 8 billion euros of footwear including re-exports, and handling substantial used-clothing flows even as silk remains below 0.5 percent of imports.