Laid off from Renfro Brands.

What Renfro Brands layoffs have meant for employees

Renfro drew the 2025 closing along department lines. It said it would keep warehousing and distribution in Fort Payne, so the closing fell on the production side of the business. Nineteen months earlier, in March 2024, Alabama's WARN list logged a Renfro layoff notice for Fort Payne, and the list calls the 2025 notice a closure, so the plant was still in production when the second notice came. If you lost a knitting or finishing job and a recruiter asks what happened, you can say Renfro closed those operations, and explaining a layoff has a few ways to put it.

As recently as 2017, Renfro was hiring at that same plant, a factory chief executive Bud Kilby said had been running since the 1980s in a town once known internationally as the Sock Capital of the World. Hiring for the 442 jobs a Walmart contract was to bring, manufacturing and supervisory alike, would be gradual and run through 2017 and into 2018, Kilby said in a February 2017 story the DeKalb County EDA's newsletter carried. The county's development director put Renfro's workforce at about 600 and called it the biggest of the 16 hosiery mills left in DeKalb County. Renfro had factories in Fort Payne and Cleveland, Tennessee, and intended to keep supporting and growing its U.S. manufacturing, Kilby told Southern Torch that month. In 2025 Renfro framed the Cleveland consolidation, in its statement to WHNT, as reworking its product mix and the supply chain behind it.

Renfro's presence in Cleveland began with an earlier deal. The company bought Charleston Hosiery's business and assets in a deal announced in November 2006, according to a Cleveland Daily Banner report that Knitting Industry summarized, after Charleston had announced plans in 2005 to combine its two Cleveland plants into one. Renfro had been a corporate citizen of Cleveland for seven years by 2013, Kilby said, as it was putting $17.5 million into its Cleveland plant with 168 jobs planned over five years. The deal had a Fort Payne side as well. Charleston's Fort Payne operation became Renfro Charleston, per the Federal Register, and Alabama's list then records a closing notice for that plant. The new Tennessee positions were tied to that Cleveland operation, which Renfro had held since 2006 and was investing in by 2013. If Renfro has offered you a Tennessee position and you're deciding whether to take it, the layoff budget calculator can show how many months your savings would last.

Federal trade adjustment assistance turns up twice in Renfro's history. Star Plant workers separated from January 30, 2001 through May 31, 2004 had been certified as able to seek it, a 2005 trade assistance notice says, and Charleston's Fort Payne sock workers separated from March 7, 2004 through April 7, 2007 could apply too, under a certification first issued in 2005, before the change in ownership, for workers hurt by increased company imports.

Fort Payne's notices went to Alabama and Clinton's to South Carolina. Alabama unemployment benefits covers who qualifies in that state and how a weekly amount is figured, and South Carolina unemployment benefits has the same for anyone from the Clinton site. If a claim from the 2025 closing has already run out, when unemployment runs out goes over what's left to try, and if you're thinking about leaving sock work altogether, the options for that switch are in retraining after a layoff. If Renfro's health plan covered you and you've been offered COBRA continuation, there's more on that choice in how COBRA works.