Abstract
Sustainability is significantly important for fashion business due to consumers’ increasing awareness of environment. When a fashion company aims to promote sustainability, the main linkage is to develop a sustainable supply chain. This paper contributes to current knowledge of sustainable supply chain in the textile and clothing industry. We first depict the structure of sustainable fashion supply chain including eco-material preparation, sustainable manufacturing, green distribution, green retailing, and ethical consumers based on the extant literature. We study the case of the Swedish fast fashion company, H&M, which has constructed its sustainable supply chain in developing eco-materials, providing safety training, monitoring sustainable manufacturing, reducing carbon emission in distribution, and promoting eco-fashion. Moreover, based on the secondary data and analysis, we learn the lessons of H&M’s sustainable fashion supply chain from the country perspective: (1) the H&M’s sourcing managers may be more likely to select suppliers in the countries with lower degrees of human wellbeing; (2) the H&M’s supply chain manager may set a higher level of inventory in a country with a higher human wellbeing; and (3) the H&M CEO may consider the degrees of human wellbeing and economic wellbeing, instead of environmental wellbeing when launching the online shopping channel in a specific country.
Highlights
Global textile consumption is estimated to more than 30 million tons a year, which causes seriously social and environmental impact within supply chain [1]
As a way to promote sustainability, developing a sustainable supply chain is an important strategy for many fashion companies
We focused on examining a sustainable fashion supply chain and we took H&M as our industry example
Summary
Global textile consumption is estimated to more than 30 million tons a year, which causes seriously social and environmental impact within supply chain [1]. Sustainability 2014, 6 awareness and looser environmental regulatory system in developing countries [3] Fashion brands such as Benetton, Adidas, and C&A are blamed to develop their supply chain unsustainably [4]. Many fashion companies recognize the importance of sustainability in business and incorporate green practices into their supply chain. Consumers’ environmental attitudes directly influence their eco-fashion consumption [7] They understand that if supply chain is more sustainable, more natural resources are used and less CO2 are emitted, in return, retail prices might be increased [8]. H&M launched the sustainability program, which is called as “Conscious Action” [11,12,13,14,15] In this program, broadly speaking, more job opportunities in less developed countries are created, more recyclable resources are used in production and consumers are educated to be more ethical [14,15].
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