Fashion Retail Industry Research Articles

Selling luxury fashion online with social influences considerations: Demand changes and supply chain coordination

In the luxury fashion retailing industry, consumers can be categorized into the groups of fashion leader and fashion follower. These two groups influence one another and create social influences in the market. In this paper, we construct an analytical model to examine the effects of demand changes on a luxury fashion supply chain with social influences. We consider the case when the supply chain consisting of one supplier and one online retailer, provides differentiated services to different groups of consumers. We identify the optimal prices and differentiated online services. To maximize the channel profit, we find that adjusting the retail price alone is enough when a demand change is small, whereas adjusting both the retail price and online retail services are necessary when a demand change is sufficiently big. Furthermore, we investigate the impacts of social influences on online retail services and find that when the impacts of social influences are increasing, the supply chain is more likely to provide better services to the fashion leader group than the fashion follower group. Last but not least, we derive the respective conditions to achieve channel coordination by using three commonly seen policies in the fashion industry, namely the all-unit quantity discount policy, the capacitated linear pricing policy, and the profit sharing policy. A comparison among these policies is made and managerial insights are generated.

Collaborative Consumption: Live Fashion, Don't Own It - Developing New Business Models for the Fashion Industry

The rise of collaborative consumption or the sharing economy has brought forward new business models in many industries, such as in hotels (e.g. Airbnb), transportation (e.g. Uber), and more recently, in the fashion retail industry (e.g. Rent the Runway). While the exchange of fashion items commonly used to take place between private individuals, an increasing number of retailers have innovated their business models to provide a platform that facilitates renting or sharing of clothing items between consumers and/or the retailer. Little academic research exists however on how retailers can design their business models to create, deliver and capture value from this new form of collaborative consumption. Based on a sample of twenty-six fashion retailers (Europe, US) that engage in fashion-sharing, this paper analyses their different underlying business models and identifies three sharing business model archetypes (Fashion Rental Model, Swapping Model, and Second-hand Retailing Model). Interviews with CEOs of these companies provide further insight into the main motivations and challenges in adopting sharing-business model. In so doing, we offer retailing managers a practical framework to guide business model innovation for collaborative consumption, as well as advance academic research by bridging the literatures on business model innovation and collaborative consumption.

Effects of Brand Experience on Brand Loyalty in Fashion Retail Business

In the retail environment where fierce competition pressure can be perceived, the role of brand experience becomes increasingly important. This study addresses the theory of brand experience and verifies its relationship with brand loyalty as well as its scales and model in the fashion retail industry. With the data collected from direct personal interviews with 285 consumers aged between 18–35 of such two fashion brands as Ninomax and Blue Exchange in Danang City, the findings suggest positive effects of the constructs of brand experience concerning sense, emotion, cognition, and relation on the two concepts of shopping experience and product experience, both of which, in turn, have positive effects on brand personality, brand trust, brand satisfaction, and brand loyalty. Particularly, brand trust is found to have no effect on brand loyalty.

Retail Marketing Strategies and Brand Management

This article aims to provide a critical review of the published literature related to retail marketing strategies and brand management in the global retail industry. The literature review covers the overview of marketing strategies; retail marketing strategies and technological utilization; international retail marketing strategies in the global retail industry; retail marketing strategies and internationalization; the challenges of retail marketing strategies in the fashion retail industry; the overview of brand management; and the significance of brand management in the global retail industry. Effective marketing is necessary to compete in the ever-growing worldwide retail industry sector. The improved retail profits are within reach with the purposeful retail marketing strategies. Brand management means defining the brand, positioning the brand, and delivering the brand. The literature review analysis provides both practitioners and researchers an important understanding about retail marketing strategies and brand management in the global retail industry.

Customer Experience Management: An Innovative Approach To Marketing And Business On The Fashion Retail Industry

The purpose of this study was to examine the issues involved in offering superior customer experience on fashion retail stores in Brazil. The approach used to access CEM (Customer Experience Management) issues was a special questionnaire with 23 questions, through a research with managers of three important brazilian fashion retail chains (focused on class A clients). Some statistical techniques were used for data processing. It was possible to analyze the aspects that impact on the customer experience and their relevance. it was possible to realize that CEM is effective in increasing productivity and, so, it can be used as a guideline matrix management in decision making to promote superior customer experiences. The classical management is usually conservative and avoids to deal with strategies that do not necessarily involve numbers. Dealing with intangible and so subtle experience is unusual and a huge challenge, but sometimes it is necessary to look beyond the obvious and accessible statistics. If CEM is a strategy to focus on operations and processes of a business around the customers experiences with the company, it is essential to structure it and find out its effectiveness.

The importance of timing in retail innovation

Purpose This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. Findings The study focuses on the marketing management perspective with the object to understand the best timing for successful innovation, and to figure out some practices able to support this choice and decrease any risks involved. Starting from a qualitative approach involving a multiple-case study analysis in the fashion retail industry, interesting insights are drawn for managing innovation in retail settings. Such insights have considerable relevance to marketing scholars and practitioners, as they provide indications on the best innovation strategy to be adopted to generate the desirable outcomes. Practicalimplications The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations. Originality/value The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

A Comparative Study on Fashion Demand Forecasting Models with Multiple Sources of Uncertainty

Fast fashion is a timely, influential and well observed business strategy in the fashion retail industry. An effective fast fashion supply chain relies on quick and competent forecasts of highly volatile demand that involves multiple stock keeping units. However, there are multiple sources of uncertainty, such as market situation and rapid changes of the fashion trends, which makes demand forecasting more challenging. Therefore, it is crucial for the fast fashion companies to carefully select the right forecasting models to thrive and to succeed in this ever changing business environment. In this study, we first review a selected set of computational models which can be applied for fast fashion demand forecasting. We then perform a real sale data based computation analysis and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these versatile models. Finally, we conduct a survey to learn about the perceived importance of different demand forecasting systems’ features from the fashion industry. Finally, we rank the fast fashion demand forecasting systems using the AHP analysis and supplement with important insights on the preferences on the demand forecasting systems of different groups of fashion industry experts and supply chain practitioners.

Optimisation of the replenishment problem in the Fashion Retail Industry using Tabu-Bees algorithm

The problem of properly allocating several different products in the stores network is one of the crucial processes in the Retail Industry. This means trying to meet market demand and at the same time reducing logistics costs. In this context, main aims of the presented work are to (a) otpimise the replenishment process for the retailer’s network of companies with multi-product multi-store configuration and (b) propose a new algorithm which combines the Basic Bees algorithm, a swarm based optimization technique, with the Tabu-Search principles. Attention is focused on the particular case of lost sales and budget constraints for a fashion company. Simulation results show that the use of the Tabu-Bees algorithm can guarantee an average 10% improvement in results allowing the model to overcome local minima.

Relationship among Interpersonal Relationship, Customer Satisfaction and Brand Loyalty in Fashion Retailing Industry

Due to the recent emergence of numerous retail options, the fashion market has become more competitive. Consumers are offered more products choices for their purchase. This has created significant challenges to fashion retailers in attracting new and retaining existing customers. This research proposes that an interpersonal relationship between employees and customers is an effective means for companies to influence the purchase decisions and experiences of customers. We have conducted an empirical study to investigate the impact of interpersonal relationships on customer satisfaction and brand loyalty in the casual wear market. Our findings show that trust in an interpersonal relationship between customer-contact employees and customers has a positive effect on customer satisfaction, which in turn, leads to brand loyalty. We suggest that fashion retailers provide training programs to equip frontline employees with professional skills that deal with issues involved in interpersonal relationships. This is an effective means that help customer-contact employees master the necessary skills to satisfy customer needs and retain customers.

Shifting paradigms for fashion: from total to global to smart consumer experience

AbstractEmergence of a global techno-economic system is challenging academia and the fashion industry. Consumers, the retail industry and business strategies are strategically contributing to the changing fashion paradigm, which is shifting from the Total (TCE), to Global (GCE) and to Smart Consumer Experience (SCE) concepts. The consumer experience is a pervasive value orientation that is transforming how consumers think, gain information, and make decisions about consumption activities to maximize their total experience value. Moreover, the experiences, products and services that consumers seek are being defined with a global and smart perspective that is made possible by boundary-free access to information and sourcing of products and services. Specifically, the smart consumer experience advocates consumer participation by leveraging the power of communities and networks and enabling consumers to influence retail businesses and co-create future marketspace values. This phenomenon has implications for fashion consumers and fashion retail industry business strategies since fashion is an emulated behavior.

The Quota-Based Compensation Plan in Fashion Retailing Industry under Asymmetric Information

We study a compensation plan problem in the fashion retailing industry, which involves a risk-neutral fashion retailer and a risk-neutral salesperson, in a two-stage game framework with asymmetric information. In the first stage, the fashion retailer provides a menu of compensation plans to the salesperson who decides which plan to sign based on his superior market demand information. Confronted with the asymmetric demand information, the fashion retailer could observe market information from the salesperson's response by designing a menu of compensation plans rather than a single one to the salesperson. In the second stage, the fashion retailer then makes production decision and the salesperson determines his selling effort. We consider both adverse selection and moral hazard. We adopt the quota-based plan to derive the fashion retailer’s optimal compensation plan design and the salesperson's best response. We emphasize the impact of the quota level on the system outcomes. The results reveal that a higher quota level is disadvantageous to the fashion retailer but advantageous to the salespersons.

A seasonal discrete grey forecasting model for fashion retailing

In the fashion retail industry, level of forecasting accuracy plays a crucial role in retailers’ profit. In order to avoid stock-out and maintain a high inventory fill rate, fashion retailers require specific and accurate sales forecasting systems. One of the key factors of an effective forecasting system is the availability of long and comprehensive historical data. However, in the fashion retail industry, the sales data stored in the point-of-sales (POS) systems are always not comprehensive and scattered due to various reasons. This paper presents a new seasonal discrete grey forecasting model based on cycle truncation accumulation with amendable items to improve sales forecasting accuracy. The proposed forecasting model is to overcome two important problems: seasonality and limited data. Although there are several works suitable with one of them, there is no previous research effort that overcome both problems in the context of grey models. The proposed algorithms are validated using real POS data of three fashion retailers selling high-ended, medium and basic fashion items. It was found that the proposed model is practical for fashion retail sales forecasting with short historical data and outperforms other state-of-art forecasting techniques.

Towards Sustainable Labour Costing in UK Fashion Retail

This paper focuses on a specific feature of buying behaviour in the UK fashion retail industry: the negotiation of a manufacturing price (cut-make-trim, CMT, cost) with suppliers that does not separately itemize labour cost. This practice, tacitly supported by both buyers and suppliers, is examined against the backdrop of ongoing wage defaulting and import price deflation in the global apparel industry. While wage non-compliance cannot be explained solely by this buying practice, since other commercial practices and factors may have an equal if not greater impact on a supplier’s liquidity/ability to pay on time and in full, the case is nevertheless made that an absence of labour costing must inevitably have an effect on the capacity of a factory to deliver an order at a negotiated price and to meet compliance benchmarks at the same time. The paper attempts to construct a formula for sustainable labour pricing at the buyer end using industrial engineering principles that appear to have been lost in the truncation of buying firms caused by international sourcing. The methodology, which can be used to calculate a living wage, has implications for international buying practice and for organized labour in the international global apparel industry and has the potential to accelerate a trend already underway in the sector towards greater consolidation and collaboration between buyers and suppliers in the manufacture of apparel.

Fashion retailing forecasting based on extreme learning machine with adaptive metrics of inputs

In the fashion retail industry, a versatile sales forecasting system is crucial for fashion retailers. In order to avoid stock-out and maintain a high inventory fill rate, fashion retailers require specific and accurate sales forecasting systems. In this study, a hybrid method based on extreme learning machine model with the adaptive metrics of inputs is proposed for improving sales forecasting accuracy. The adaptive metrics of inputs can solve the problems of amplitude changing and trend determination, and reduce the effect of the overfitting of networks. The proposed algorithms are validated using real POS data of three fashion retailers selling high-ended, medium and basic fashion items in Hong Kong. It was found that the proposed model is practical for fashion retail sales forecasting and outperforms the auto-regression (AR), artificial neural network (ANN), and extreme learning machine (ELM) models.

AHP 기법을 이용한 의류쇼핑 소비자의 선호점포 유형과 점포선택 속성에 관한 연구

This study determines a consumer retail store choice by applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method for multi-criteria decision-making in the fashion retail industry. The study provides detailed and relevant information for management, marketers of fashion retail stores, and to improve competition between suppliers. Data was collected in February 2011 from questionnaires completed by 319 university students in Busan, South Korea. One of the major findings of this study was that consumer store preference was affected by the following factors in order of importance: product, image, service quality, and purchase facilitation. Brand image was assessed to be the most important of the evaluation elements, followed by individuality, style, and price. The results of rating the relative importance and priority of fashion retailers showed that department stores ranked most highly, followed by outlet malls, Internet shopping malls, brand malls, and discount stores.

Aestheticising retail workers: Orientations of aesthetic labour in Australian fashion retail

The term ‘aesthetic labour’ has come to describe the recruitment, selection, development and deployment of physical and presentational attributes geared towards ‘looking good and sounding right’ ( Warhurst and Nickson, 2007 : 104). Further research has identified a degree of stratification within interactive service work, with further distinctions developing around how particular aesthetic requirements reflect firms’ brand strategies, market orientations and how they appeal to different consumer groupings – what we term, following Pettinger (2004 , 2005), ‘aestheticised labour’. This article presents quantitative data and analyses the prevalence, character and use of aesthetic and aestheticised labour in the Australian fashion retail industry based on a study of fashion retail stores in the central business district of Sydney, Australia. Building on previous work, it identifies that what constitutes aesthetic labour varies according to the market segment and character of the store and brand. As such it reinforces the utility of ‘aestheticised labour’ as a means of identifying nuances in the intensity and orientation of aesthetic labour within the retail sector.

Intelligent product cross-selling system with radio frequency identification technology for retailing

Abstract This paper presents a combined use of both RFID technology and product cross-selling system to perform cross- and up-selling for retail industry. In this study, two systems, namely the Smart Dressing System (SDS) enabled by RFID technologies, and Intelligent Product Cross-selling System (IPCS), have been developed. The SDS demonstrates a research endeavor in which, unlike the previous studies focusing on transactional data, customers' in-store data can be collected using RFID-enabled SDS and used for promoting or cross-selling new products to the customers effectively and efficiently. The IPCS, integrating a rule-based expert system and a fuzzy screening technique, can handle the difficulty of processing linguistic and categorical information to simulate fashion designers to recommend appropriate fashion product items for cross-selling effectively. The proposed systems are evaluated to execute the selling strategies more effectively, which in turn improve sales performance in fashion retail industry.

Marketing and organisational development in e-SMEs: understanding survival and sustainability in growth-oriented and comfort-zone pure-play enterprises in the fashion retail industry

Following calls to explore organisational development in a fashion retail marketing context this paper conceptualises and explains how 14 fashion retailers operating purely online have developed their enterprises via a six-stage approach, through which they moved at various speeds, either in a linear sequence or concurrently. Effective strategies to secure sustainability for comfort-zone and growth-oriented enterprises are identified, including the development of online portfolios which acknowledges the presence of habitual entrepreneurship in fashion electronic retailing. This paper represents the first in-depth multiple case study into independent, successful pure-players marketing clothing, footwear and accessories categories online. A qualitative case approach is employed from a social constructionist perspective. Rich data is generated via in-depth interviews with owner-managers. Results are developed through thematic qualitative analysis and theoretical contributions are based on data saturation across cases and fashion categories, thus offering strong horizontal and vertical credibility. Findings stress the role of developing internet-technology competencies, strategic marketing and service capabilities in the quest for successful e-retailing in pure-play enterprises, alongside overseas market development and demonstrate an emphasis on planning for the small firm. The current findings therefore differentiate this group of enterprises from the majority of small firms accused of poor technology utilisation/competency, lack of planning and weak marketing. The paper provides strong understanding of the complexities of organisational development in pure-play retailing. That these firms have navigated the recent recession and that many have survived online for over 10 years emphasises the importance of the strategic directions explained in this paper to the marketing/entrepreneurship interface.

Corporate Governance Disclosure in Hong Kong Fashion Retailing Industry

This study is to identify the role of Corporate Governance (CG) and its importance in Hong Kong fashion retailing industry. It compares the CG performance of the listed companies, and then examines the relationships among CG disclosure, proportion of independent non-executive directors (INEDs) on the board and the company size. Content analysis has been adopted to analyze data, and CG disclosure guidelines of Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants are used as evaluation tools to analyze the CG disclosure of the selected companies. The study result supports the relationship between CG disclosure and company size. It also discovers there is no relationship between the disclosure and the proportion of INEDs. This study provides further information for the fashion retailing companies to examine the importance of Corporate Governance.

Retailers' use of niche marketing in product development

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to investigate the growing trend of the use of private labeling as a competitive strategy among fashion retailers. Specifically, how retailers differentiate and create niche markets within their own private label merchandise is examined. The study focuses on how retailers develop and expand their private label portfolios, while minimizing the risk of cannibalization.Design/methodology/approachThe research methodology is an in‐depth case study design that is used to gather information from a selected sample of those retailers that participate in apparel private label product development.FindingsResults indicate a strong use of a niche marketing strategy by retailers in the development and implementation phase of private labels. The strategy resulted in increased profits and market share.Practical implicationsThe study is significant because it provides a framework for a globally competitive strategy that retailers can utilize in order to develop specialized, niche markets within their private label merchandise, while minimizing the risk of cannibalization.Originality/valueThere is a void in the current research literature relative to the use of a niche market strategy as a competitive strategy by the fashion retail industry, particularly when related to the development and marketing of private label merchandise.