Tiedemann Globe Incorporated: Leading International Secondhand Textile Recycling and Wholesale Sorting

Company overview

Tiedemann Globe sorts, bales and ships used clothing, shoes and household goods from a facility in Phoenix, Arizona, and states that it has been serving buyers worldwide since 1994, which it rounds to over thirty years. Contact runs through [email protected], an alternative address of [email protected] given on the enquiry form, a WhatsApp callback, and a phone number, (602) 278-6545, which the site itself marks as voicemail only.

The company describes itself as working with no middlemen, sorting and shipping from its own Arizona site.

What makes this entry worth reading is not the volume figures, which are not published. It is that the company lays out three separate ways to buy, sorted by how much you can take, and almost nobody in this directory does that in writing.

Three doors, sorted by order size

• Full container orders for importers and large buyers taking 50,000 lb and up: sorted and graded used clothing, shoes and household textiles, shipped worldwide from Arizona.
• Buy by the box through a separate site, raghouse.com, aimed at store owners and resellers who need less than a container. Hand-picked vintage and modern clothing, new items added daily, with the option to buy online, schedule a video call, or visit the Arizona facility in person.
• Wiping rags in white knit and coloured knit, in any quantity, for commercial and industrial buyers.

Read that ladder as a piece of commercial information rather than a menu. In this trade most houses serve one scale and leave you to work out whether you are too small to bother them, which wastes a fortnight of emails on both sides. A supplier who publishes the entry point for a box, a pallet and a container has told you where you fit before you write.

The cheapest way to test an American grader

The middle door is the interesting one, and it solves a problem this directory keeps running into. Buying your first container from a house on another continent means committing 50,000 lb to a grading standard you have never seen applied. The by-the-box route lets you buy a small quantity from the same operation, in your own hands, for the price of a courier parcel.

That is the same argument made elsewhere in this catalogue about a Belgian supplier's two-kilo pack: the point of a tiny order is not the goods, it is finding out what this particular house means by its grade names. The video call option extends it, since watching someone pull items in front of you tells you more about a sorting line than any specification sheet. Anyone comparing second-hand clothing suppliers across an ocean should be using both before signing for freight.

They sell odd shoes, and say so

The buyer's form lists footwear as paired or singles. That single word is worth more than it looks.

Unpaired shoes are the standing embarrassment of this trade. Every sorting line generates them, they are close to worthless in retail, and elsewhere in this directory a Belgian house explains that its odd shoes are packed separately for export to Pakistan, which is precisely why its own footwear ships in genuine pairs. Here is the other end of that same arrangement: a house that says openly it will sell you singles as a line in its own right.

The practical use is a question you can now ask anyone. Do you sell singles, and if so, how do you keep them out of my paired bales? A supplier with a named outlet for odd shoes has an answer. A supplier who says they barely have any is either unusually lucky or not looking.

What Arizona means, and what is not published

Where a sorting house sits determines what walks through its door, and Phoenix is not Chicago or Toronto. It is worth asking this house directly what its seasonal mix looks like, because a collection drawn from a hot, dry state will not resemble one drawn from a northern winter city, and the answer decides whether the goods suit a tropical market or a temperate one. That is a question about their catchment, not a criticism of it, and any serious supplier will have the answer ready.

Be clear about what is missing before you plan around this entry. No grades are named, no bale weights are given, no minimum order is stated beyond the 50,000 lb container threshold, and no tonnage or headcount is published. The account of how sorting houses handle incoming material explains what those numbers would tell you, and the standard grade vocabulary is what a wholesale buyer needs to pin the specification down in writing.

Two more honest notes. The website was rebuilt recently and is thinner on operational detail than the version some third-party listings still quote, so treat older figures found elsewhere as unconfirmed. And the founding year deserves a direct question: the company's own site says 1994, while some business directories list a later date. Ask, since a decade either way is a fair thing to know about a supplier you are wiring money to.

Frequently asked questions

Where is Tiedemann Globe based?

In Phoenix, Arizona, where it sorts and bales used clothing, shoes and household goods for shipping worldwide.

What is the minimum order?

Container orders start at 50,000 lb, but smaller buyers can purchase by the box through the company's separate site raghouse.com, and wiping rags are offered in any quantity.

Can a buyer inspect goods before ordering a container?

Yes. The company offers online purchase by the box, scheduled video calls, and visits to the Arizona facility in person.

Does the company sell unpaired shoes?

Yes. Footwear is offered as paired or singles, which is unusual to state openly and worth asking about before ordering paired bales.

What is not published?

Grade names, bale weights, prices, tonnage and staff numbers are not given on the site, so all of that has to be agreed in writing.