Brand portals, Carhartt, Dickies, Red Kap, Bulwark FR. How do they integrate?

Every major workwear brand has a different distribution shape. Five real patterns:

• Carhartt Company Gear (B2B division of Carhartt). Authorized-dealer application + product feed (SFTP nightly or REST API). I build a Magento feed connector module that pulls stock + price + spec daily, maps to a vendor_brand=carhartt attribute. Decoration eligibility flag per SKU (some Carhartt items are decoration-restricted by brand contract).
• Dickies distributes through wholesalers (S&S Activewear, Alphabroder, SanMar) for decoration; through retail wholesale for direct. The wholesaler feed is the integration point, S&S has a solid REST API, Alphabroder has CSV + SOAP (older), SanMar has REST + SOAP. Pick one as primary, fallback to second.
• Red Kap (VF Solutions / VF Imagewear). Same wholesaler distribution as Dickies, often through Alphabroder. Red Kap is the “industrial laundry” standard for autos / oil & gas / chemical, a Red Kap catalog is mandatory for any uniform store targeting those verticals.
• Bulwark FR (VF Imagewear). Restricted-access, Bulwark only sells through authorized FR dealers, often gated to specific industries (electric utility, oil & gas refining). I model this as a customer-group-restricted catalog: hidden from public storefront, visible only after customer-group assignment by a sales rep. Adobe Commerce B2B Companies handles this natively; Open Source needs a customer-group-aware category-visibility extension.
• Wrangler RIGGS / Berne / Walls, smaller brand portals, wholesaler-distributed (often through SanMar). Same connector pattern as Dickies.

Architecture: one Magento attribute (vendor_brand) ties everything together. Category page facets by brand. Customer-group rules gate brand visibility. Feed connectors run nightly via Magento cron, drift-checked daily. New brand = new connector module (~$4k, $8k each).