Operations Management in the Era of Fast Fashion

Being environmentally sustainable is one of the crucial activities in fast fashion supply chain management as the fast fashion industry has a serious impact on our planet. In the existing literature, numerous frameworks, methods, and studies have addressed the sustainable operations management (SOM) and circular supply chain management (CSCM). In this introductory chapter, we first highlight the importance of SOM and CSCM in fast fashion era. Then, we concisely review the recent literature and examine some important topics. We also introduce the papers featured in this book.

Sustainability is an important topic in fast fashion system as the fast fashion companies have been blamed for causing harmful repercussions to the environment and society. This study aims to demonstrate the existence of a valid alternative to fast fashion, to achieve environmental, economic and social sustainability. A case study of a German fashion company, named Jan ‘N June (JNJ), which combines sustainability, voguishness and competitive prices is conducted to reveal the methods and solutions that are useful to develop a sustainable supply chain in fashion industry. From the case, we uncover that JNJ commits to use sustainable materials, conduct recycling, consider social welfare, adopting eco-packing as the measures for being sustainable and competitive in the market. Besides, we also find that transparency is important in achieving sustainability. Currently, there are some methods to apply transparency within the fashion company, including communicating the sustainable practices through online channels, using ECO-ID labels, and adopting textile certifications.

Fast fashion provides consumers tremendous trendy clothes each season through quick response of the supply chain. Because of the short life cycle of fast fashion product, the pollution becomes more serious. In recent years, many fast fashion brands have tried more to make the brand image to be more environment friendly. In this chapter, we review research works related to sustainable fast fashion and real industry practices in different domains, such as sustainable fashion design, sustainable raw materials and production, sustainable brick and mortar store design, fast fashion sharing platforms, sustainable labels and packaging, sustainable marketing campaigns in fast fashion. We find that research on sustainable supply chain and operations deserve more exploration. Although fast fashion brands have done much on sustainability, consumer education should be put more efforts on. And the scope of sustainability may expand more, not only the environmental impact, but also includes labor conditions and animal welfare.

Fast fashion is a well-established and timely business model in the fashion industry. The common characteristics of fast fashion include a short product life cycle and the need for quick production and distribution of highly trendy products. In order to support the fast fashion business model, fast fashion companies have to conduct quick predictions of the highly volatile demand of a lot of stock keeping units (SKUs). In this chapter, we first examine a carefully selected set of computational models which can be applied for fast fashion demand forecasting. Supported by real data analysis, insights regarding the strengths and weaknesses of these versatile models are discussed. Then, a panel data-based interval forecasting model that can effectively reflect the uncertainties in the forecasting results for decision makers is proposed. By conducting comparison studies with popularly used ELM-based interval forecasting model, some important conclusions are generated.

Fashion demand forecasting has been a challenge for long as it is influenced by not only explicit factors such as historical selling data and price, but also implicit factors such as consumers’ purchasing intentions and fashion trend. This paper focuses on exploring how to forecast fashion demand using panel data model, based on historical sales data and search index. Further, this study demonstrates how search index can improve the performance of the forecasting model. The daily sales data from a small size fashion company focus on niche market and search index in 2018 were used to examine the effectiveness and usefulness of our proposed SIPD. The feature of the proposed SIPD model is in line with the situation that small size fashion enterprises who have little useful data in most cases.

This article applies a multimethodological approach to study a marketing and operations management interface problem in fashion supply chain management. This article first conducts a case study to reveal how a fashion supplier can adopt advanced technologies to commit sustainability in real-world practice. Then, a Stackelberg game is built to analyze the optimal pricing, advertising level, and sustainable technology investment decisions for a supply chain with environmentally conscious consumers. It is found that the optimal wholesale price is dependent on the supplier’s production cost but independent of technology cost rate and promotion cost rate. There are three situations that the supplier will commit a higher sustainability level. Specifically, the supplier has either a higher production cost or a higher technology cost rate will result in a higher sustainability level. In addition, when the retailer’s promotion cost rate increases, supplier will react by having a higher sustainable commitment level if her technology cost rate is significantly large.

Sustainable operations management (SOM) is a well-established field, which is crucially important to fashion business nowadays. Traditional SOM studies employ methods such as theoretical modeling (e.g., mathematical analyses), quantitative empirical (e.g., surveys), and qualitative empirical (e.g., interviews, case studies). In recent years, to enhance research rigor, more and more SOM studies employ a multi-methodological approach to explore research problems related to the fashion industry. In this paper, we discuss applications of the multi-methodological approach for fashion SOM. We examine how the multi-methodological approach has been applied in the related literature. We propose new methods as well as new areas for future fashion SOM research in which the multi-methodological approach can be applied. Important insights are derived.

We first give an introduction to the evolution of the fashion supply chain structure from linear to circular. Next, we review and discuss the important elements that should be considered and analyzed in sustainable operations in a fast-fashion era, namely, advanced technology, customer involvement, collaborative strategy, and government support. Finally, we draw our conclusion and propose future research directions.