Traditionally national retailers outsource apparel production via global brokers to thousands of small apparel makers. The typical manufacturer usually located in a low-wage country is small-scale operation that employs a few to a few dozen workers. In a laborintensive process, workers make specific pieces of clothing, often in a narrow range of size and color, which are then integrated with output of hundreds of other such companies spread across dozens of countries. As more companies in more countries make more specialized products, one factory makes zippers, one makes linings, one makes buttons, and so on multinational trading companies perform as cross-border intermediaries and supervise the assembly of component pieces into finished goods, which are then shipped to apparel retailers