Fashion Industry: Ready To Face The Future

The fashion industry is very complicated. There are no standard fashion companies. They come from a wide spectrum of enterprises in the apparel, footwear, home textiles, and accessories markets. The industry comprises various kinds of companies like retailers, design source and selling companies, companies with manufacturing facilities, and others that outsource production but retain control over parts of the production process.

Moreover, companies in the high fashion segment often face different pressure than those working with commodity fashion goods.

These aspects combine to make the fashion industry one of the most complicated. Yet, various issues can be noticeably recognized as common across the industry.

Fashion

. Consumers have the power

. Supply chains are complicated

. Product launching and delivery takes time

. Companies must be able to manage a product mix

. Inventory control maintenance is important

. Impact of the latest technology in the fashion industry

. Copyright issues for fashion designs

Consumers have more power

Today’s buyers have more purchasing power than ever and are less tolerant due to increased time pressure in today’s lifestyles.

They are more aware of environmental and human rights issues and have superior quality demands. They demand a huge variety and more frequent changes in their choices. Moreover, they expect immediate availability of a perfect matching set of garments and accessories in the same store in their preferred color and size combinations.

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Retailers are the first in line to satisfy the consumer’s needs. Still, all companies in the supply chain are driven by the prerequisite of anticipating their customers’ expectations and requirements. All supply chain members must check that stores have the correct necessities when the consumer needs to buy!

Companies that respond quickly to consumer requirements will remain profitable in an environment of rapid global competition and increasing material and operational costs.

Supply chains are complicated.

Global supply chains and complicated logistics distinguish the fashion industry. Labor and transportation costs often determine where production occurs, and outsourcing all or part of production is common. Companies throughout the industry have to deal with global sourcing problems and need to evaluate their sourcing strategies regularly.

Production work is often done across multiple places, which may also be located in different countries. Setting up cutting, sewing, subcontracting, transportation, and synchronizing with raw material supply is tedious.

Product launching and delivery take time.

The industry takes a long time to introduce a new product in the market because it must go through the many pre-production steps, including yarn or fabric selection, garment development, specification, and sampling.

The industry’s long lead times are due to the complex supply chain and the global nature of production. This arrangement of long time-to-market and long lead times does not correlate with the need to react immediately to changes in customer requirements.

The industry’s ever-changing seasonal and trend-driven nature depicts that the product life cycles are too short. Even for cyclic demands where the life cycle may continue, there are often small changes to the design, and color or size combinations may be changed. The logistics of managing a large number of styles and maintaining stock-keeping units is a difficult practice.

Companies must manage a product mix.

Besides long lead times, fashion producers are constantly stressed about designing and developing new product lines to maintain retailers’ interest and increase consumer sales. Producers have noted that to maintain this speed, raised flexibility and quickness to satisfy changing customer demand, which is quicker than ever before, it is very challenging for them to judge or come out with such products. Gone are the days when a perfect fashion trend direction decided what consumers wore. Many styles are available, and with rising globalization, consumers can approach fashion news through the latest media tools.

Fashion products change from hosiery and basic underwear through medium-priced high street brands to exclusive high fashion brands. Managing brand awareness and brand loyalty is a serious task in retaining a market position. Margins in repetitive basic products are low, so neither a retailer nor a manufacturer can ever afford to be out of stock.

Shifting to the high-end fashion sector, margins increase, and sales volumes are lower. Still, consumers demand an ever-changing range of choices, forcing the companies to produce multiple collections yearly.

Many companies must try to overcome the added challenge of arranging a mix of repetitive lines, collection-driven products, and a requirement to segment their product range and set the different segments suitably. If companies need to perform well, the demand of various product segments must be separately tackled from design to demand planning, sourcing, production, distribution, and sale.

Companies require clarity about the market sector they are targeting and have to direct their business in that way.

Inventory control management is important.

Companies try to keep inventory levels at a minimum in all industries. Maintaining inventory levels under control in the fashion industry is the worst due to less product life cycle. In this industry, there is only one solution to sell the goods.

When these products are introduced, the entire floor sets must be in the retail stores for collection-driven brands. Otherwise, the chance to sell the goods is missed, and obsolescence exposure is a high risk.

Retailers and suppliers mustn’t undergo stockouts for the products that are frequently in demand. This part of the market does not possess the same level of brand loyalty, and customers may well be attracted to shift brands if the color and size they require are not immediately available in the stores when they need to buy.

For all companies, the main problem is balancing the act of keeping inventory at the necessary level to fulfill demand while ensuring that they are not left out with obsolete inventory.

Latest technological impact on the fashion industry

The Burton Amp jacket, depicted as “the world’s first and only wearable electronic jacket with an integrated Apple iPod,” was introduced recently.

Today, new technologies are so involved with clothing and apparel that you can not judge whether you are wearing technology or whether technology is wearing you. According to some fashion experts, clothes will soon become your gadgets’ accessories. Besides, electronics will keep decreasing in size so much that we will no longer need the objects to hold them. Hence, today, the fashion industry is experiencing new challenges: “Intelligent textiles,” “smart clothes,” “i-wear,” and “fashion engineering” are only a few of the trends that will transform the entire fashion industry within the next decade.

Nowadays, many new materials and technologies are applied in textiles and accessories when they are too costly or primitive for other applications. Various electronic devices can already be made into clothes, which will rise. New fabrics are already being developed to generate power using solar, ele, electromagnetic, thermal, and mechanical means.

The combination of high technology in textiles, e.g., modern communication or monitoring systems or the development of new materials with new applications, has just begun. Still, the branch has already moved in a gigantic expansion for this sector. Particular applications for the health and security sector, e.g., clothes with external monitoring systems, already exist in large quantities today.

Within the coming few years, we’ll see more new applications for the latest technology in garments. Hence, fashion designers and engineers face many design challenges when making the most demanding fashionable wear.

Copyright issues for fashion designs

Fashion apparel is a multi-billion dollar business with no national boundaries due to its global existence. Designers, retailers, and consumers decide their statements according to international fashion trends. Consumer awareness of particular designers has also risen dramatically in the last decade. Magazines and newspapers also cover the fashion industry as a part of their national news coverage, concentrating on the dynamic world of creative designer expressions.

The commoner is very aware of the names and faces of fashion models and the designers they model. At present, many television channels and feature films involve the fashion industry. Consumers can now identify the various types of designers and designs.

Today, many designers find inspiration from street fashion, celebrities, vintage styles, and other designers’ work. Even though there are possibilities of duplication in products and designs due to easy accessibility of the latest printing and computer technology and the appearance of the regional or traditional methods in apparel worldwide, it can not be ignored easily. Coping with this issue globally is a challenging task.

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Alcohol scholar. Bacon fan. Internetaholic. Beer geek. Thinker. Coffee advocate. Reader. Have a strong interest in consulting about teddy bears in Nigeria. Spent 2001-2004 promoting glue in Pensacola, FL. My current pet project is testing the market for salsa in Las Vegas, NV. In 2008 I was getting to know birdhouses worldwide. Spent 2002-2008 buying and selling easy-bake-ovens in Bethesda, MD. Spent 2002-2009 marketing country music in the financial sector.