The dress blues: the rag trade is getting a little frayed around the edges, and salesmen's endurance is wearing thin.

• Author: Bailey, David

The rag trade is getting a little frayed around the edges, and salesmen's endurance is wearing thin.

Nick Rudisill sits in his showroom at the Charlotte Apparel Center. The strapping ex-Marine stares in disbelief at the racks upon racks of frilly blouses, silky skirts and bright shorts hanging all around him.

"A couple of days ago, I was pleased with my business," he says, "but now things have turned around."

Another salesman sticks his head in the door on the way to his showroom: "I heard," he says.

"Yeah, it hurts," Rudisill replies. "It really hurts."

What hurts is that Degage Sportswear Inc., the Seattle-based women's-apparel manufacturer whose line Rudisill has been selling since February, has shut its doors. What hurts is that Rudisill won't be getting a commission on $140,000 in orders he got from specialty shops in the Carolinas, the Virginias, Kentucky and Tennessee. What hurts is that Degage won't be sending him a check that would have helped pay the $686-a-month rent on his showroom or the $1,600 in travel expenses that he owes American Express or the payment due on his fancy new van.

"I bought a show van because I thought this line was going to rock 'n' roll," he says. Instead, Degage, a maker of fashionable, moderately priced "missy" clothes, sang its swan song in early July. A company spokeswoman says it just didn't have enough cash to stay in business.

Rudisill is one of more than 1,000 apparel sales representatives in North Carolina. Many live in or work out of Charlotte. Sales reps of all kinds call the Queen City home, selling $21 billion of goods annually and making it the nation's sixth-largest wholesale center.

Although the Atlanta Apparel Mart with 2.5 million square feet of space and 1,000 exhibitors a show - outshines both the Charlotte Merchandise Mart and the Charlotte Apparel Center, the two marts have found a niche selling mostly moderately priced lines to shops whose owners can't afford or don't want to go to Atlanta.

More than 600 members belong to the Charlotte-based Carolina-Virginia Fashion Exhibitors Inc., which shows women's clothes and accessories at the Apparel Center. The shows draw 20,000 participants annually. The Charlotte-based Men's Apparel Club of the Carolinas Inc., which holds shows in the Charlotte Merchandise Mart, has 400 members. Children's clothes, gifts and jewelry are also shown there.

North Carolina reps - some of whom have been around for decades - say business is bad. A few say it's as tough as they've ever seen it. In order to make sales, they say they're having to hustle like never before. Forget those predictions made a decade ago that modern sales representatives would do most of their business from a showroom or over the phone, taking orders by computer. Salesmen who are selling say they're doing it the old-fashioned way out on the road, going from town to town, from store to store.

The gravel crunches beneath the tires of Charlie Fox's 34-foot Itasca motor home as he maneuvers into the parking lot of Oxford Industries Inc. in Gaffney, S.C.

Other salesmen say that Fox, 48, who's been in the business more than 22 years, has it made. You won't see him busting his butt wheeling racks into stores, they say. Fox is among a growing number of reps who have bought traveling salesrooms so they can show their goods in air-conditioned privacy. Sales reps say they are amazed at Fox, who manages 10 different lines of clothing (most salesman consider five a full load) and lands accounts with stores that do $1 million of business with him each year.

Fox is certainly not doing badly. In a very good year (which he says last year was not), he can gross $200,000. He declines to say how much is left after expenses.

But that doesn't mean he isn't hustling. The week before the Fourth of July, when some reps are taking it easy, Fox is on the road: in Salisbury on Tuesday; in Charlotte, Gaffney and Spartanburg, S.C., on Wednesday; in Hartwell, Ga., on Thursday; and in Bluefield, W.Va., on Friday. On Saturday, he says, he'll catch up on paper work.

Sure, Fox could show his goods at the Apparel Center and sell over the phone, but there's no substitute for face to face, he says. And these days, that contact can keep someone else from taking your business away from you. "It's a fight sometimes to see...