Cloth merchant

[1] A cloth merchant might additionally own a number of draper's shops.

A number of Europe's leading banking dynasties such as Medici and Berenberg built their original fortunes as cloth merchants.

In England, cloth merchants might be members of one of the important trade guilds, such as the Worshipful Company of Drapers.

Alternative names are clothier, which tended to refer more to someone engaged in production and the sale of cloth, whereas a cloth merchant would be more concerned with distribution, including overseas trade, or haberdasher, who were merchants in sewn and fine fabrics (e.g. silk) and in London, members of the Haberdashers' Company.

The largely obsolete term merchant taylor also describes a business person who trades in textiles, and initially a tailor who keeps and sells materials for the garments which he makes.