Fabric Coating & Commission Finishing
The industry — Textile and fabric finishing and fabric coating
Base industry report for 3133 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 107
- Under 10 employeesA
- 70%
Of 107 Canadian establishments with employees, 70% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Structure decidesThe binding constraint is not executional. Being better than the incumbent does not, by itself, get you in — this one is cleared with capital, an asset, or a permission.
Come with the asset, or buy the business that owns it. Plant, fleet, land or quota decide this market before any operating skill does. Operators here are bought, not started.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 2
The binding constraint — capital intensity
The pre-screen read this as a finishing plant with an environmental permit attached. The size bands complicate that: 75 of the 107 Canadian establishments have fewer than ten employees, so small shops plainly exist — dye houses, garment finishers, short-run laminators. The group splits in two, and the halves are moving apart. Commission finishing is derived demand: it processes other mills' cloth and other makers' garments, and as those customers thin out so does the work — $110.0M of revenue in 2024, from $120.2M in 2019 [A]. Coating and laminating is the half that grows — $290.0M in 2024, from $239.9M in 2019 [A] — because a coated fabric is a product with its own specification, sold into protective clothing, transport and industrial uses. So the reachable half is shrinking and the growing half is the expensive one. A coating line is a coater, a curing oven, solvent or plastisol handling and an air permit, all sunk before a customer has qualified a single roll, and the whole group ran expenses above revenue in 2022 and a surplus of only 3–8% in the years around it [A]. The cut is capital intensity: the entry an ordinary entrant can afford is the dye house whose customers are disappearing, and the entry worth having costs a plant.
Commission finishers serve the fabric mills and apparel makers within trucking distance, which in Canada means the Montreal and southern Ontario clusters. Coated fabric is a specified product shipped to manufacturers across North America. Taken together the group competes nationally, with imports of coated fabric as the alternative for every buyer.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
The field
Every operator named on this record, and what each one discloses. A private single-site operator discloses nothing, which is the normal case — the listed consolidators are the only window in.
Competitor set · 3 named · 0 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| SergeFerrari GroupSEFERA | not disclosed | — | FY2025 revenue €347.5M, up 7.4%, Americas up 42.7%. The only operator in this field that publishes anything, and it reports in euros for a European business — deliberately not carried into a dollar total |
| Stedfast · Vintex · Texel · DoubletexC | not disclosed | — | Canadian coaters, laminators and converters on the Canadian Textiles Industry Association's published member list. All privately held; none publishes revenue and none was researched beyond the listing |
| The 107 Canadian finishing and coating establishmentsA | not disclosed | — | The competitive structure itself: 75 with fewer than ten employees, one with 200 or more; 52 in Ontario and 25 in Quebec (Statistics Canada, December 2023) |
Nobody here publishes revenue. The market is not sized for that reason — an estimate built on nothing would only look like knowledge.
Evidence
Evidence. The revenue and expense series are from Statistics Canada's Annual Survey of Manufacturing and Logging Industries, table 16-10-0117-01, 2024 preliminary [A]; the 2012 values sit on the far side of a series break the agency flags and were not used. No US figure is attached because the code did not join cleanly to County Business Patterns. The establishment count was supplied from the agency's December 2023 business counts [A]. No Canadian company anchor exists — the Canadian coaters are private and none reports results — so nothing here sources what a line costs or what a Canadian coater earns. The nearest listed comparable, added with the competitive field, is SergeFerrari Group, whose FY2025 revenue, geographic split and self-estimated market size were read in its own results release of 26 January 2026 [A]; it is a European membrane maker and its figures size the product category, not the Canadian trade. The Canadian names come from the Canadian Textiles Industry Association's published member list [B], which establishes membership and nothing else. That the small establishments are dye houses and garment finishers is inferred from the definition and size bands. The capital figure that carries the cut is UNVERIFIED, and the cut factor is analyst judgment.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
Site states 1,400+ member companies in specialty fabrics and technical textiles; market-segment groups and a member community.
ATA's annual trade show and Emerging Technologies Conference; 2026 edition 3-5 November in Orlando.
Nonwovens and engineered fabrics body; test methods, courses and market data relevant to coating and laminating.
National apparel industry body and the customer side of garment finishing; apparel.ca redirects here. Trade bulletins and webinars.
US textile manufacturers' association; trade and tariff advocacy that sets the terms commission finishers work under.
Trade title with a dedicated dyeing, printing and finishing section plus technical textiles coverage.
AATCC (aatcc.org) blocks automated access from this network and was not listed.