Canadian Apparel Import Pressure Monitor

Methodology

What this is for

Three things you don't control can move your costs: how hard it is to ship goods around the world, the Canadian dollar against the US dollar, and how much of your buying depends on a few countries. This page puts a plain reading on each, translates the currency one into dollars, and points to what in your business is worth checking. It does not tell you what to do: it doesn't know your contracts, margins or suppliers, and you do. It does not forecast your costs, and it says nothing about any specific supplier or brand.

What you enter

The product you mostly buy, your monthly purchases, the share of those purchases paid in US dollars, and roughly what share comes from each country. These are estimates you give, not data we collect, and they stay in your browser and the page address.

How the status labels are decided

Each signal is compared with its own history and given a z-score: how far today is from its average, measured in standard deviations (the size of a normal up-and-down for that signal). Around 0 is average, up to 1 is within the normal range, 1 to 2 is unusual, 2 to 3 is rare, and 3 or more means something is really off. Below 1 is shown as Normal, 1 to 2 as Worse than usual, and above 2 as Much worse than usual. These cut-offs are a first-pass choice and haven't been tested against real price changes yet.

The three signals

• Shipping. The New York Fed's Global Supply Chain Pressure Index, which tracks how much it costs to ship goods and how long deliveries are taking around the world. Today is compared with the full record since 1998. A shorter record would be dominated by the 2021–22 crisis, which would make bad conditions look normal. The "worse than X% of months" line covers the last 10 years, and "last 3 months" shows whether it is getting better or worse. This is worldwide, so it is the same for every business.
• Currency. Two checks on the US/Canadian dollar rate, each compared with history since 2017 and averaged: how much the rate has changed over the last 30 business days (about six weeks), and how much it has gone up and down over the last 90 (about four months). The dollar figures are simple arithmetic: your monthly purchases times the share paid in US dollars, times the change in the rate. "Normal change over six weeks" is the standard deviation of the six-week change since 2017.
• Suppliers. A reliance score for your country mix: square each country's share and add them up (one country at 100% scores 1, an even spread scores close to 0). It is compared with the same score for Canada's imports across all clothing and footwear product lines over the last 12 months. "Other" counts as spread across many suppliers, so it adds nothing.

Data sources

Limits to keep in mind

• Dollar figures assume you keep buying the same amount and pay today's exchange rate. If you have locked in a rate with your bank, or your supplier changes its prices when the rate moves, your real numbers will differ.
• Country means where customs says the goods were made, which is not always where they were sewn.
• About 0.0001% of import value has no country recorded and is left out of the reliance figures.
• Past history is a guide to what is unusual, not a forecast. This is not financial advice.

How this page works

There is no server. A weekly job downloads the latest data, recalculates it and publishes small data files next to this page. Your browser loads them with DuckDB-Wasm and runs the SQL you can open under each chart, right on your device.