New sustainable concepts and strategies for the fashion business
Sustainability and Fair Fashion are not new to people working in the fashion business. For more than two decades there have been several efforts to create a more sustainable an ethical supply chain in the fashion industry. There are many projects running for global eco-labelling paired with the demand for transparency along the supply chain and also concepts like living wages. Actually - theoretically we know how it works! So why does it not work in practice? Because nobody wants to pay for it! For this reason, we should ask ourselves - how can we make it work? How can we make people wanting to pay more for their clothing?
We have to sensitize the consumers to ethical consumption. Sustainability should get fashion. How does something become fashion? If we look at fashion as a phenomenon it seems that the fashion industry is perfectly capable of influencing fashion but is not capable of influencing fashion when it comes to sustainability at all. The fashion industry has intentionally driven fashion changes since the fifties/sixties of the 20th century (King 1963) and has oversaturated the apparel market after introducing fast fashion in the nineties of the last century. Now the fashion industry faces the challenge to convince young people that they should pay more for a T-Shirt than for a coffee from Starbucks. The purchase behavior of the final fashion consumer of today is learned behavior that can be credited to the fashion industry itself. During the past decades, the fashion industry has catered for the loss of value in the consumers' perception of fashionable apparel through purposeful obsolescence. Apparel Manufacturers and Fashion Retailers have done everything possible to make the final consumers desire or need constantly more and new clothing for less money. And fast fashion companies made it possible. New technologies made it possible.
But now it is about time to save fashion! We have to develop strategies that we can produce and sell less but better items at a higher price. From a marketing point of view that means that we have to stop selling dreams and start selling peace of conscience. And this does not mean Greenwashing! This will not work in our media landscape today.
To develop a strategy, we have to express our goals clearly. The objectives that we aim for have to be quantifiable and realizable. We have to keep in mind the following aspects:
1. In our western society our apparel markets are saturated. Consumers have after paying their rents and insurances, transport costs and their nourishment a certain share of wallet for free disposition. The current economic and political development does not cater for a rise in spending of this disposable share of wallet on apparel. This leads to stagnation or even a decrease of the total spending on apparel if there will not be any unforeseeable changes. So, it will not work to sell higher quantities at raised prices. It will even not work to sell the same number of pieces at raised prices. It will be more likely that there will be less pieces sold, when the prices rise. But - if we are doing a good job, we can achieve the same sales volume as before.
FIRST OBJECTIVE: Sell less but higher priced articles
- finance ecological, ethical and social actions
- finance accompanying measures to communicate the higher value of the products
- through reduction of lot size, we will have to deal with changes in costing (less storage costs, less distribution costs, higher share of fixed costs per item, higher production costs, disappearance of economies of scale…)
2. Fashion is most notably a social phenomenon and ranges between the human need of integration and demarcation (Simmel, 1905).
Fig. 1 Georg Simmel - Philosophie der Mode, 1905
This leads to the process of fashion being a perpetual cycle. Invention and introduction, leadership, dissemination, conformity, saturation and finally decline.
Fig. 2 The Fashion Cycle
During this cycle individuality decreases whereas conformity increases. When conformity establishes itself, there is a saturation and decline of the fashion, something new is needed. So, there will be another fashion invented and introduced to ensure individuality and the cycle will begin again. That means the faster the dissemination of fashion through new media and fast fashion, the shorter the period of individuality and therefore the product cycle.
SECOND OBJECTIVE: Prolongation of the product life cycle
- justifies raise in price by longer duration
- grants the consumer a longer period of individuality
3. In apparel fashion development there are four design parameters:
Fig. 3 Design Parameters of Fashion according to Hermanns
These parameters have to be examined with regard to their potential in sustainability. Most companies these days concentrate on the parameters fabric/fibre or colour (dyeing, chemicals) when they approach sustainability subjects and focus on ecological aspects.
But there are more design parameters to be looked at, such as "sustainable forms, shapes, silhouettes" from the companies and the consumers point of view. Zero Waste is an option for companies and adjustable apparel could be an option for consumers. What can one do to create sustainable forms in apparel? The same questions have to be asked when it comes to patterns and designs of the fabrics and yarns.
THIRD OBJECTICVE: Development of sustainable designs using all design parameters
- grants a "sustainable signature design" of the collection
- enables clear representation of the USP
- leads inevitably to deeper understanding of customer demands and preferences
Hence there are three substantial sustainability objectives for the fashion industry:
1. Sell less but higher priced articles.
2. Prolongation of the product life cycle.
3. Development of sustainable designs using all design parameters.
The next step is to turn awareness of the objectives into strategic implementation within the fashion companies. Basically, most fashion companies could easily produce fashion in a sustainable way. With today's knowledge of apparel engineering along the supply chain, sustainable product development and manufacturing is not a problem at all. The true challenge is to produce and sell sustainable apparel to reasonable prices. Sustainable fashion is not fashionable yet! Therefore, we need strategies to make consumers desire sustainable fashion, to cater for sustainable fashion to become fashion.
So, to begin with, we have to keep in mind how fashion diffuses within society. Rogers describes the diffusion of innovations as shown in figure 4:
Fig. 4 Diffusion of Innovation (Rogers, 1962)
Innovators: experiment, create
Early adopters: follow, multiply
Early majority: adopt innovation faster than others
Late majority: adopt innovation due to social pressure
Laggards: suspicious of innovations
According to Paul H. Nystrom something is in fashion or fashionable when a significant number of people accept it in a certain period of time. Therefore, the measurability of "in" & "out" is not dependent on opinions, but quantitatively detectable. This finding represents the basic concept for life cycle models of fashion trends, which can be graphically described as follows:
Fig. 5 Diffusion of a Fad, Fashion and Classic (Sproles, Burns 1994)
This implies that for sustainability to be in fashion we need a measurably growing number of adopters within a certain period of elapsing time. So, what can be done to make sustainability fashionable? What can be done to make a significant number of consumers accept sustainable fashion - and pay for it?
To understand why certain fashions are accepted by the consumers and some fashions are not, we have to take a look at the psychology of fashion.
In 1985 Valerie Steele used theories of Freud to substantiate fundamental aspects of human behavior towards fashion and human experience with fashion. She examined the relationship between clothing and the psychological self and found out that we reveal facets of our personality through our vesting behavior. We show our self-perception by what we are wearing:
Clothing provides us with significantly higher individuality as our body will reach through natural appearance. We present an ideal of our self. Therefore, our clothes or any change in appearance simultaneously reflect our personality. Hence fashion is also an instrument of communication, we communicate with our choice of appearance. Thus, our deliberate decision for a certain appearance moves within an area of conflict between the concept of our self and our ideal self.
Fig. 6 Area of conflict between concept of self and ideal self
Furthermore, dress or change in appearance can enhance our self-esteem, on one hand through aesthetic evaluation and on the other hand through the awareness of being adequately dressed in a certain role or situation.
According to Gertrud Lehnert we have on one side the aesthetics of the design of a garment or the commercialization of a garment through aesthetic orchestration and on the other side the self-design through our choice of garments in terms of designing of the self.
We experience fashion as an area of conflict between its design in itself and the symbolism of its aesthetics. The symbolism adds - through orchestration in a certain context - a particular appearance to the wearer of that fashion.
Fig. 7 Fashion as an aesthetic oevre
According to Lehnert, dress has to possess an aesthetic surplus that transcends the mere function of garments to become fashion. Only through emotionalizing something becomes fashion! But only through social consensus within a group, no matter how big or small it is, something can become fashionable - we need the acceptance!
Fig. 8 Consensus and acceptance with regard to fashion
This is the key aspect! It is not enough to only create a sustainable product; the product must be presented within the corresponding context containing an emotionalizing attitude towards sustainability. We do not only have to manage the product but also the context in which we offer the product. As already stated before - we do not have a problem to produce sustainable fashion at all - the perfect sustainable garment can be made if along the supply chain everything is managed accordingly. The context-side poses the real challenge, a strategy to emotionalize "the product" to be desired from a lot of customers has to be developed.
Fig. 9 Design of product and context
The acceptance of the masses is possible when preferred tastes and current trends are identified, considered and adjusted. Especially at this point the need of or demand for "something new" has to be replaced by the need of or demand for "abstinence". Conspicuous consumption has to turn into conspicuous abstinence or conscious consumption. The prestigiousness of a person must rise when he or she is capable of adjusting and varying existing garments and seldom adding new pieces.
This is possible through design - not only product design, but context design. The future challenge for the fashion industry will be emotionalization and communication. Sustainability in fashion has to be fixed in the consumers' minds so that it will be absolutely socially inacceptable to buy and wear cheap and not sustainably produced clothing. That will not be easy, but we are already in a rethinking process.
Li Edelkoort stated early 2016 that people will want to consume less products in the future because they lose interest in possession. The things they surround themselves with will have to be perfect. This is the beginning of the rethinking process - think of kondoing, the lean closet movement and many more manifestations of Edelkoort's assumptions. Furthermore, this is the time for the fashion industry to start to keep up with these new developments.
The fashion industry has to fix their sustainability objectives according to the customers in their market segments and define how their products have to be repositioned to reach their sales targets. Communication will play a crucial part in the new strategy because the consumers have to understand the new contexts explaining the sustainable positioning. Therefore, the following steps have to be followed:
1. Definition of the corporate claim, brand identity
2. Orchestration of the brand, emotionalizing
3. Determination of communication- & sales-channels
It is most significant to focus on one idea that will offer a special benefit to the consumer. Creativity and strategy will lead to an explicit corporate claim. Conviction and Know-how will cater for an excellent product and that has to be communicated to the customer. Ideally there will be feedback from the customers and the companies can start a dialogue with their customers. After all, the customer should be in the center of the fashion industries considerations and eventually supply new ideas for new and better products.
Fig. 10 The customer as supplier of new ideas
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