Apparel and textile executives should stop treating tariffs, oil-price swings and climate shocks as reasons for rapid supplier moves, and instead price them into sourcing strategy as permanent risk categories. That was the core message from Ridwan Bhuiyan, vice president for digital products at insurer Chubb, speaking at an industry gathering in Vancouver.

Bhuiyan's pitch to the room was blunt: companies need to identify concentrated supply-chain risks before losses occur, not after a disruption forces an expensive scramble. His framing lands squarely on the buy-side desk. An insurer telling sourcing teams to map their exposure concentration is, functionally, an argument that underwriting and sourcing decisions are now inseparable.

The context for his comments is concrete. The closure and disruption of key trade routes and waterways has hit textile supply chains over the past two years, stretching transit times and compounding cost pressure from tariffs and fuel. For sourcing directors, that means the traditional fallback — shifting volume to a cheaper or closer factory when a lane goes bad — carries more downside than it used to.

What are executives actually prioritising?

The industry sentiment around the Vancouver discussion points to three preferred responses over rushed supplier switches:

• Diversified sourcing — spreading order volume across multiple countries and tiers rather than reacting to a single shock with a single move
• Recycled materials — investing in inputs that reduce exposure to virgin-fibre price volatility and tightening compliance regimes
• Better risk data — building the visibility needed to see where production is concentrated before a loss event, echoing Bhuiyan's core call

The common thread: none of these are quick. All three are structural choices about how a sourcing book is built, not tactical responses to a bad quarter.

Why the insurer's warning matters now

Bhuiyan speaks from the side of the table that pays claims. When Chubb's digital products lead says concentrated risk needs mapping pre-loss, he's describing what his underwriters see in the loss data: apparel supply chains clustered in a handful of corridors, with trade-route disruption turning a logistics headache into an insurable event.

For practitioners, the implication is direct. If you can't show your insurer or your board where your volume sits by country, port and tier (tier meaning each level of the supply chain, from fabric mill to cut-and-sew factory), you're pricing your own risk blind. Trade-route closures have already demonstrated that a single chokepoint can move landed costs across an entire season's order book.

Diversification versus panic-shifting

The distinction executives drew in Vancouver is the one sourcing teams should hold onto. Diversification — deliberate, planned distribution of orders — is a hedge. A knee-jerk shift of volume after a shock is a bet that the new destination stays stable, which recent history doesn't support.

The pattern the industry is warning against is familiar: a tariff announcement or canal closure triggers an emergency move, the new supplier base inherits its own risks, and the company has traded one concentration for another while absorbing transition costs. Slower, data-backed diversification avoids that trap but requires the risk visibility Bhuiyan described — knowing your exposure before the market tells you.

The decision this forces

Every sourcing head reading this faces the same question: can you currently quantify, by supplier and by lane, what a trade-route closure or tariff change would cost you next season? If not, that mapping exercise — not a country switch — is the first item on the list.