A bale is the unit the whole Thai secondhand trade runs on, and almost nobody publishes what is inside one. Here is what the evidence actually says.
The Deep South number
The best-documented figure comes from reporting on the Pattani and Yala trade in February 2025. US-origin bales arrive via Malaysia and sell to Thai vendors at around ฿1,000 (about $29.60). Each contains either:
- 200–220 T-shirts, or
- 150–180 jackets or trousers
That works out to ฿4.50–฿6.70 per garment landed. Those same vendors retail from ฿5 a piece up, and the documented outliers are spectacular: a 1970s shirt bought at ฿80 resold at ฿22,000, and a 1997 Spider-Man tee auctioned at ฿220,000.
The wholesale price ladder
| Unit | Typical price | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Mixed bale, US origin | ~฿1,000 | Deep South, via Malaysia |
| Brand-mix T-shirt bale, 45 kg | ฿13,500 | G Rags 72, published |
| Carhartt jeans, 80 pieces | ฿46,000 (~฿575/pc) | G Rags 72, published |
| Kilo-shop retail | ฿390/kg (฿39 per 100 g) | Shinjuku Outlet |
| Kilo-shop wholesale | ฿30–39/kg | Shinjuku Outlet, via Facebook |
| Rummage floor | ฿5–25/piece | Pattavikorn, Rong Kluea |
Note the spread between the ฿1,000 mixed bale and the ฿13,500 branded bale. You are paying twelve times more per kilo for somebody else's grading. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on whether you can sell what comes out.
What the grades mean
Thai wholesalers use grading language loosely and inconsistently, but broadly:
- Grade A / Cream — wearable, no visible damage, current-ish. The stuff that goes straight to a rail.
- Grade B — minor flaws, stains that may wash out, dated cuts. Sellable at a lower price point or after repair.
- Grade C / rag — damaged, stained, unwearable. This is what ends up at ฿5 a piece, or in the export flow to Myanmar at $0.52/kg.
An unsorted mixed bale at ฿1,000 is not Grade A. If it were, it would cost ten times more. Assume a realistic split of something like 10–20% genuinely saleable to a Western resale market, 30–40% saleable locally at low prices, and the rest a disposal problem.
Doing the maths honestly
Take the ฿1,000 / 220-shirt bale. At an optimistic 15% hit rate for your end market, that is 33 saleable shirts, and your cost per saleable shirt is ฿30 (about $0.90). Add freight at $9–15 per kilo for air, call it 0.2 kg per shirt, so $1.80–3.00 a shirt in freight. You are landed at roughly $3–4 a shirt before any customs exposure.
At a $12–15 minimum profit per item — the figure practitioners aim at — that works. At a 5% hit rate it does not.
The variable that decides the whole thing is your hit rate, and your hit rate depends on who you are selling to. A Depop seller doing Y2K needs different stock from a Grailed seller doing archive. Decide the end market before you buy the bale.
Why the prices are never published
Every Thai wholesaler except G Rags 72 gates pricing behind an enquiry. The Japanese trade publishes MOQs — KL Vintage requires ¥300,000 ex-tax per order, cash on delivery — and European kilo wholesalers publish per-box rates at €9–15/kg. Thailand publishes almost nothing.
That opacity is the market inefficiency you are buying into. It is also the reason a first-time foreign buyer routinely pays two to three times what a Thai shop owner pays for the same sack.
The defences are simple and unglamorous: buy small first, go back twice, bring someone who speaks Thai, and never accept a price that was invented the moment you walked in.
What we are doing about it
We publish what we find. If you buy a bale in Thailand and count what comes out of it, send us the numbers and we will add them to the Bale Index — anonymously if you prefer. The trade has been opaque for thirty years because nobody on the buying side has ever shared data.