This Gildan-owned T-shirt brand is popping up everywhere

When looking through Wyatt Cannon’s T-shirt collection, there’s a common theme: the Comfort Colors label.

Growing up, Cannon would often find Comfort Colors apparel when looking for souvenirs during family trips. In college, Cannon convinced his a cappella group to screen print on the company’s blank shirts. When the 24-year-old has made tie-dye T-shirts for himself, it’s with Comfort Colors product.

“I’ve loved this brand my whole life,” said Cannon, who estimates around half of his shirts are Comfort Colors. “This kind of material and texture and vibe of T-shirt should just be more of the standard.”

Cannon is part of a loyal and growing base of consumers driving demand for the half-century-old, Gildan-owned shirt brand. The label’s ballooning success in recent years can help explain Gildan’s stock outperformance and has led to plans for an expansion into additional product categories.

Gildan is tight-lipped about specific brand performance and declined to share Comfort Colors’ sales data with CNBC. But company executives have said Comfort Colors took off, especially over the last year, and has become a leading brand within Gildan, which also sells apparel under its namesake label and American Apparel.

“Comfort Colors is probably the fastest-growing fashion brand,” Glenn Chamandy, Gildan’s co-founder and CEO, said during a call with analysts earlier this year. “When you walk into a souvenir store today, you’ll see Comfort Colors on every single one of those tables where you used to see fashion brands before.”

Gildan acquired Comfort Colors for around $100 million in 2015 in hopes of expanding within the basics category of North America’s printwear market, according to a press release announcing the deal. At the time, Gildan called the Vermont-based apparel maker “one of the most recognized brands” in places like college bookstores and resorts.

The brand publicizes that its shirts are 100% cotton from the U.S. Its “pigment pure” dyeing system creates the shirts’ “signature faded look” and requires less energy and water use than other comparable processes, Gildan says.

Comfort Colors’ popularity exploded in 2024 with around 40% year-over-year growth, company executives have said on earnings calls. That helped drive sales in Gildan’s broader activewear category up 6% in the same period.

Chamandy told analysts in late July that Comfort Colors is “knocking it out of the box again this year” and helped drive the activewear category up 12% in the second quarter. The brand is planning to expand into hats, bags and women-specific clothing in 2026 as it rings in its 50th anniversary, Howard Upchurch, marketing and merchandise chief at Gildan, said in a statement to CNBC.

Gildan, which announced earlier this year it was acquiring Hanesbrands as it further builds out its basic apparel business, is expected to report…