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 a small-scale operation that employs a few to a few dozen workers. In a labor-intensive process, workers make specific pieces of clothing, often in a narrow range of sizes and colors, which are then integrated with the output of hundreds of other such companies spread across dozens of countries. As more companies in more countries make more specialized products i.e., One factory makes Zip pers, 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.