Business Models and ICT Technologies for the Fashion Supply Chain

Digitization and social media have influenced retail advertising and created new forms of commerce, consumers are now accessing Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter as well as various applications to make immediate product buying decisions. In this market scenario where consumer interaction and immediacy became important items to be considered by fashion brands, the “See Now Buy Now” (SNBN) business model emerges as a response to this new market. This change where the product is available for sale right after the runway show and collections launches causes changes in supply chain planning and the whole process of new product development, requiring a more flexible and adapted NPD (new product development) with new processes and timelines. Thus, this article aims to propose a holistic and hypothetical NPD model based on the Agile Stage-Gate theory, within the SEE NOW BUY NOW (SNBN) theme, with the lead user interaction as the leading process development metric.

The luxury market segment includes different industries in its aura of high quality and price. The Italian excellence is ascribable to the three F (food, fashion and furniture), that have in common the attention they are paying to the Product Development process. The objective of the present study is to explore product development and the need for ICTs in fashion, furniture and food companies belonging to the luxury market segment. Strategies, activities, issues in process management and the most used ICTs are analysed. Comparing these sectors, the authors have been able to identify commonalities and differences. With the aim to investigate also improvement areas, several best practices and cross fertilization are discussed.

A peculiar characteristic of fashion companies is their natural predisposition to transformation. In fact, they design new collections at least two times per year. Introducing new collections means developing simultaneously hundred of new products that has to match customer’s tastes/trends that evolve very fast. By acquiring and monitoring customers’ information from social and digital channels, fashion industries can capture customer’s tastes/trends picture. This requires analyzing a huge amount of heterogeneous data, such as feelings, positions, etc. In this scenario, the use of big data analytics can provide new insights on customer’s tastes/trends. Hence, the objective of this research is to examine how some of the most important and sophisticated applications of Big Data Analytics could increase customers’ satisfaction and bring advantages to the New Product Development process itself.

This research explores whether fashion brands heritage and prestige perceived by consumers affect their brand loyalty intention. Specifically, the research aims at investigating if heritage and prestige matter in branding strategist based on engaging consumers in social media brand communities. Social media brand communities initiated by fashion brands represent the setting of this research. In fact, it has been assessed that members of brand communities usually are more informed on brands products and value than the average consumer. In order to achieve the aim of the research, a moderated structural equation modeling analysis has been developed and tested. Results show that, on the one hand, heritage has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between consumers’ engagement in online communities and brand loyalty intention; and, on the other hand, prestige showed a positive moderating effect on such a relationship. Managerial implications and suggestions for future researches are discussed.

Word-wide and also in Turkey, little research has been done on adolescents as a consumer market, especially regarding their evaluating criteria, expectations and problems relating to clothing. The research was therefore conducted to explore and describe the adolescent female consumers’ expectations and evaluations related to her selection of clothing. In doing so, it mainly focused on the fit of cloths. The survey was applied to more than 200 adolescent girls who were randomly selected from the most populated areas of Istanbul. The participants were within the age range of 9–16. The data collected were analysed using IBM SPSS (23), based on the relevant statistical significance and data summary techniques. The chi-square analyses were also conducted to seek the similarities (or dissimilarities) between the age groups and their major clothing problems.

Companies working in fashion retail require scientific methods to transform the enormous amounts of data they collect into information that can be useful to predict future sales. Literature has presented a huge number of statistical/data-science based techniques, able to perform forecasting of time series, like the number of pieces—belonging to a certain brand or category—sold in retail stores. This paper aims to put together some of these methods to build a robust meta-model able to better understand the hidden relationships between data. Classical and more recent methods to compute a category level forecast are shown, giving particular attention to the modeling of price effect. Finally, we show that the use of a metamodel helps reducing the forecasting error on the yearly category forecast by 24%.

In a complex and unpredictable world, nowadays classic risk management techniques are often nor sufficient neither adequate to face the occurring disruptive events. When black swans events (low probability—high impact events) take place, many supply chains are not qualified to tackle those happenings in an efficient way. A resilient approach can fill this expertise gap, providing the necessary know-how and mindset qualities to supply chain players in order to tackle those rising disruptions better. In particular, resilience is a key component in the fashion industry supply chain. In the last decades, many companies declined and retired, while several thrived. The resilience approach was one of the keys that divided successful firms from the unprofitable ones. This research provides a broad view of the literature review about resilience approach within the fashion industry supply chain. Furthermore, in ordimpact of possible disruptionser to assist academics and supply chain decision makers, this study will extensively show the state of the art of the current methodologies used to assess and measures resilience in one’s supply chain.

With few historical data and quick response of the market, fast fashion apparel retailers should make decisions about replenishment policies and assortment strategies. Deciding the quantity to deliver for each point of sales, in term of quantity and assortment mixture, is one of the big retailers challenges, and keys of success. In this paper, our proposal is about a mathematical model, for fast fashion retail planning chain. Our model is a dynamic tool to make the loop on the assortment, replenishment and inventory quantities, to help decision makers delivering the right product in the right point of sales with the right quantity, by maximizing the profit. It constitutes a flexible tool, allowing retailer to add new items in the optimization process, or even to renew the product range regularly, for fast fashion retailers, who aim for just in time production models. The replenishment supply chain is fragmented into strategic, tactic and operational levels. Each level is modeled as an integer linear program. Looping is made from Head Quarters, through countries until stores. Chorological horizon is sub divided according to season collections, monthly and weekly basis. Our integer linear programs are developed and solved with IBM Cplex Optimizer. Model validation is established with random data instances, inspired from real case studies.

Digital practices in fashion are gaining more attention, starting from digital communication, online reputation, up to eCommerce. Such highly moving dynamics—related both to the fashion market as well as to new available technologies and communication tools—require well-prepared and skilled employees, able to navigate in this constantly changing environment with needed competences, updated knowledge, and creativity. Within this study, current market needs in the field of digital fashion are investigated through the analysis of the open job positions published on LinkedIn. In particular, needed skills and competences to join digital departments of fashion companies are examined.

The present paper aims to analyse the main barriers and drivers that obstacle and push the adoption of an eBusiness standard, such as eBIZ, and IoT technology, such as RFId, within the fashion industry. This purpose represents the first step of the European project “eBIZ 4.0—Enhancing textile/clothing sector by eBIZ and RFIds technologies adoption”, aiming to promote the integration between RFId technology and eBIZ standard for improving data interoperability among companies operating along the fashion supply chain. The tool used for this kind of analysis has been an online survey dispatched to the mailing list of all the project partners belong to different European Community countries and involving both software houses and fashion companies. The survey results have been crossed with the external variables that characterize the analysed companies, in order to classify the evidences related to one or another cluster of companies similar in terms of external variables such as dimension, headquarter location, industry segment.

The paper strives at benchmarking performances of dual frequency inlays, operating in UHF and HF bands, when deployed in the apparel logistics and end-user retail processes. The developed testing protocol makes it possible to evaluate performances of RFID devices in simulated supply chain and end-user-oriented processes. It has been designed according to the needs for identification both of the supply chain and of the end-users, who can take advantage of the adoption of NFC technology. We applied the testing procedure to RFID inlays equipped with an innovative IC and two antennas, capable of managing both EPC communication in UHF band and NFC communication in HF band with smart devices. The performances of the inlays have been compared to standard tags commonly used in EPC and NFC fields. We measured and compared read rate, accuracy, and read time when testing EPC capabilities, and read/write throughput, time and distance when measuring NFC functionalities. By simulating a real-world environment, test results give a direct insight of performances to be expected from different dual frequency RFID inlays. Therefore, IT and logistics managers can find answers to how these innovative tags perform and which would be the best choice for new RFID applications.

In recent years, bigger and bigger attention is addressed towards the sustainability concept at all levels of the fashion supply chain. One of the main triggers of this trend is the increased awareness of the final consumers whose needs and wishes are translated in new requirements for the supply chain actors, from downstream to upstream, in a life cycle perspective. At the same time, there is a flourishing of certifications and labels related to different sustainability aspects and, often, it could be difficult to perceive the peculiarities of each instrument. In order to adopt them as a strategic lever in the sustainability management, it would be useful to have some support to make informed decisions about which instruments meet at the best the needs of customers, whilst reflecting the actual performance of a company. This paper develops a set of guidelines that could support companies belonging to the fashion supply chain in identifying which tool, certification or label, is the most appropriate considering the specific context. Available tools have been first identified and, then, classified mapping and assessing them against a set of criteria that resulted to be relevant in the fashion environment. Though the research takes advantage of the authors’ experience in the field, the paper is mainly of a conceptual nature. Empirical validation of the guidelines is the necessary next step to refine and complete the proposed guidelines.