TAIEB LABOUZ Hand-Sorted Used Clothing and Footwear, Spain

Company overview, and a warning about the website

Taieb Labouz is a Spanish company that buys, sorts and sells second-hand clothing and used footwear, stating 25 years in the business. It buys unsorted used clothing from across Europe, hand-sorts it on its own premises, and exports to Europe, Africa and Latin America. The directory records it at Cocentaina, Alicante, on +34 966 17 05 22 with [email protected].

Before anything else, a caution that matters more than any of the above. The contact page on the company's website carries placeholder data, not real details. It gives the email as [email protected], the telephone as +34 123 456 789 and the address as "Calle Ejemplo, 123, Ciudad, España", with the location paragraph still reading "[Ciudad, España]". The customer testimonials on the About page are generic template filler of the same kind. None of that is the company lying to you; it is an unfinished website that was published with its demo content still in place. But it does mean you must not use the site's contact details, and you should treat anything on it that looks like a specific claim with the same suspicion until the company confirms it.

What the company actually says about its operation

Setting the template text aside, one paragraph on the About page is written about this business and it is worth taking seriously:

• It buys unsorted used clothing from all over Europe.
• It carries out exhaustive manual sorting, separating items by quality and by type: men's, women's, children's and household.
• It offers mixed lots or single-type lots according to what the customer needs.
• It exports to Europe, Africa and Latin America.
• It names women's, men's, summer and winter clothing, children's clothing, and footwear of cream quality.
• It invites buyers to visit the premises.

Those six lines describe a small hand-sorting house buying raw material and selling to order, which is a distinct and useful position in this directory even though the site around it is unfinished.

Single-category lots, and why the answer differs by scale

The most commercially interesting claim is the offer of mezclas variadas o iguales, mixed or same-type blends, chosen by the customer. Read that against a Dutch plant catalogued here, which states flatly that it does not supply large volumes of single categories, no men's-only and no children's-only loads, because it works from balanced European collection streams with production planning behind it.

Both answers are honest and the difference is scale, not willingness. A plant running a 5,000 kg minimum out of a national collection network cannot strip one category without wrecking every other customer's mix. A hand-sorting operation working through purchased unsorted bales can put a sorter on one line and fill a single-category order, because the volumes are small enough that nobody else's allocation moves. So if you need one category, the useful lesson is that you should be looking at smaller hand-sorters rather than pushing a large plant that has already told you no. The trade-off is that you will pay for the labour, and consistency between orders is harder to guarantee.

Manual sorting is a stated method, not a gap

The company puts hand sorting forward as a selling point rather than hiding it. That is worth reading against the other end of the catalogue, where a British house describes robotic sorting across 900+ tonnes a week and an Italian operation lists advanced optical sorting technology.

Neither approach is simply better. Automated lines are consistent, fast and cheap per kilo, and they are the only way to move that kind of tonnage. Hand sorting catches what machines miss, which is exactly the judgement calls that decide the top grades: whether a brand is desirable in a particular market, whether a stain will wash out, whether a garment reads as vintage rather than merely old. The grade ladder describes what those judgements produce, and the top of it has always been made by people rather than sensors. What you should ask of a hand-sorting supplier is how many sorters work the line and how they are trained, because at this scale the grade is the sorter.

"Cream quality footwear", and the third Spanish use of the word

The site describes its footwear as calzado de calidad crema. Cream is the standard term for the top grade across this trade, and this is now the third entry in this directory to use it: a footwear specialist grades its best paired shoes and boots as cream, and another Spanish warehouse sells a line called primera mezclada con crema.

That consistency is useful in practice. Whatever language the negotiation happens in, cream means the same thing, and a buyer can specify against it. What varies is the proportion available: a Birmingham exporter in this catalogue puts cream at roughly 5% of what it sorts. Applied to footwear specifically, and to a company buying unsorted European material by the bale, cream-grade shoes are a thin seam. Ask what volume of it exists per month before you build an order around it.

Two Spanish entries, twenty-five kilometres apart

A small geographic note that the directory's own records make visible. This company sits at Cocentaina and another entry catalogued here, a wholesale used clothing warehouse, sits at L'Olleria. The two are about twenty-five kilometres apart in the same inland Valencian and Alicante district.

For a buyer planning a trip that is directly useful: two independent second-hand operations within half an hour of each other, both of which invite visits to their premises, make a single journey worth more than one appointment. It is also a reminder that the Spanish trade is not concentrated in the port cities. The wider picture of where European supply sits and where it moves is set out in the European secondhand market analysis.

What to establish before ordering

Because the site cannot be relied on for detail, essentially the whole specification has to come from the company directly. There are no bale weights, no minimum order, no prices, no tonnage, no sorting capacity and no verified address anywhere in its published material.

The list to put in an email: the real address and VAT number, the bale or bag weights offered, the minimum order, whether the price is per kilo or per piece, what proportion of a single-category lot is genuinely that category, and the monthly volume of the cream footwear line. Ask also where the unsorted material is bought, since "all over Europe" covers collection streams that differ enormously in size profile and brand mix. And take up the invitation to visit, because with a wholesale supplier whose website is unfinished, an hour on the sorting floor is worth more than any amount of correspondence.

Frequently asked questions

What does Taieb Labouz do?

It buys unsorted used clothing from across Europe, sorts it by hand into quality and type categories including men's, women's, children's and household, and sells mixed or single-type lots for export to Europe, Africa and Latin America. It states 25 years in the trade.

Are the contact details on the website usable?

No. The contact page still carries the template's placeholder data: [email protected], +34 123 456 789 and "Calle Ejemplo, 123". Use the details recorded in this directory instead and confirm them with the company.

Can I order a single category?

The company says it offers mixed or same-type blends according to customer needs, which is the opposite of what a large Dutch plant in this directory will do. Hand-sorting at small volume makes single-category orders possible; confirm what share of the lot is genuinely that category.

What grades are mentioned?

Only one is named directly: cream quality footwear. Cream is the standard top grade across this trade, but it is typically only a few per cent of any sort, so ask what monthly volume actually exists.

Can I visit?

Yes, the company invites buyers to see its premises, and given that its website is unfinished a visit is the practical way to verify the operation, the sorting method and the goods.