Pursuing profitability in slow fashion: Exploring brands’ profit contributors

Abstract

Circularity has been ineffective in shifting the fashion industry's ever-growing carbon footprint, as its focus fails to prioritise slowing the cycle of consumption and production. In contrast, the framework of sufficiency explicitly calls to reduce and slow the cycle of production and consumption by ‘making do with less’. The fashion industry's manifestation of sufficiency is slow fashion, which embodies products that are made to last, and can be serviced to extend lifespan. While there is growing knowledge on slow fashion, there is a lack of empirical research on sustaining profitability in slow fashion. This study investigates the following: What are the profit contributors of UK slow fashion SME brands? We use semi-structured interviews with UK slow fashion SME brands to investigate novel practices that drive profitability. Findings include profit drivers related to product construction and design, collection size, rate of newness and lifespan, production and supply chain practices to suppress costs, product services to diversify and drive revenue, and consumers' values and behaviours. We discuss novel actions that brands may implement to capture, create, and deliver value whilst adopting slow fashion practices, and we offer insight on the profit contributors of slow fashion brands to inspire future research and practice.