case study research fashion

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• 02 Apr 2024
• Research & Ideas

Employees Out Sick? Inside One Company's Creative Approach to Staying Productive

Regular absenteeism can hobble output and even bring down a business. But fostering a collaborative culture that brings managers together can help companies weather surges of sick days and no-shows. Research by Jorge Tamayo shows how.

• 05 Dec 2023
• Cold Call Podcast

Tommy Hilfiger’s Adaptive Clothing Line: Making Fashion Inclusive

In 2017, Tommy Hilfiger launched its adaptive fashion line to provide fashion apparel that aims to make dressing easier. By 2020, it was still a relatively unknown line in the U.S. and the Tommy Hilfiger team was continuing to learn more about how to serve these new customers. Should the team make adaptive clothing available beyond the U.S., or is a global expansion premature? Assistant Professor Elizabeth Keenan discusses the opportunities and challenges that accompanied the introduction of a new product line that effectively serves an entirely new customer while simultaneously starting a movement to provide fashion for all in the case, “Tommy Hilfiger Adaptive: Fashion for All.”

• 25 Apr 2023

How SHEIN and Temu Conquered Fast Fashion—and Forged a New Business Model

The platforms SHEIN and Temu match consumer demand and factory output, bringing Chinese production to the rest of the world. The companies have remade fast fashion, but their pioneering approach has the potential to go far beyond retail, says John Deighton.

• 04 Apr 2023

Two Centuries of Business Leaders Who Took a Stand on Social Issues

Executives going back to George Cadbury and J. N. Tata have been trying to improve life for their workers and communities, according to the book Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership by Geoffrey Jones. He highlights three practices that deeply responsible companies share.

• 26 Jul 2022

Can Bombas Reach New Customers while Maintaining Its Social Mission?

Bombas was started in 2013 with a dual mission: to deliver quality socks and donate much-needed footwear to people living in shelters. By 2021, it had become one of America’s most visible buy-one-give-one companies, with over $250 million in annual revenue and 50 million pairs of socks donated. Later, as Bombas expanded into underwear, t-shirts, and slippers, the company struggled to determine what pace of growth would best allow it to reach new customers while maintaining its social mission. Harvard Business School assistant professor Elizabeth Keenan discusses the case, "Bee-ing Better at Bombas."

• 24 May 2021

Can Fabric Waste Become Fashion’s Resource?

COVID-19 worsened the textile waste crisis. Now it's time for the fashion industry to address this spiraling problem, say Geoffrey Jones and Shelly Xu. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 18 May 2020
• Working Paper Summaries

No Line Left Behind: Assortative Matching Inside the Firm

This paper studies how buyer relationships influence suppliers' internal organization of labor. The results emphasize that suppliers to the global market, when they are beholden to a small set of powerful buyers, may be driven to allocate managerial skill to service these relationships, even at the expense of productivity.

• 08 Apr 2019
• Sharpening Your Skills

The Life of Luxury and How to Sell It

Luxury is its own market, but who shops there? Who sells there? What's the best strategy? Researchers at Harvard Business School examine consumerism at the top of the curve. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 02 Apr 2019

Managerial Quality and Productivity Dynamics

Which managerial skills, traits, and practices matter most for productivity? This study of a large garment firm in India analyzes the integration of features of managerial quality into a production process characterized by learning by doing.

• 08 Nov 2018

Could Big Data Replace the Creative Director at the Gap?

Is it time to throw out the creative director and rely on big data to predict what consumers want to wear next? Assistant Professor Ayelet Israeli discusses how Gap CEO Art Peck considers a bold idea to boost sales. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 21 May 2018

How Would You Price One of the World's Great Watches?

For companies with lots of innovation stuffed in their products, getting the price right is a crucial decision. Stefan Thomke discusses how watchmaker A. Lange & Söhne puts a price on its 173-year-old craftsmanship. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 24 Aug 2017

Does Le Pliage Help or Hurt the Longchamp Luxury Brand?

Longchamp's iconic but affordable Le Pliage bag is a conundrum for the company, explains Jill Avery in this podcast. Does an affordable luxury product work against the top-tier brand? Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 13 Mar 2017

Hiding Products From Customers May Ultimately Boost Sales

Is it smart for retailers to display their wares to customers a few at a time or all at once? The answer depends largely on the product category, according to research by Kris Johnson Ferreira and Joel Goh. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 06 Jan 2016
• What Do You Think?

Why Do Leaders Get Their Timing Wrong?

SUMMING UP: Is good management timing primarily a function of strategy or culture? James Heskett's readers add their opinions. What do YOU think? Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 21 Nov 2015

HBS Cases: Stella McCartney Combines High Fashion with Environmental Values

Fashion designer Stella McCartney is the subject of a recent case study by Anat Keinan showing that luxury and sustainability need not be mutually exclusive. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 02 Sep 2015

What's Wrong With Amazon’s Low-Retention HR Strategy?

SUMMING UP Does Amazon's "only the strongest survive" employee-retention policy make for a better company or improved customer relationships? Jim Heskett's readers chime in. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 20 Jul 2015

Globalization Hasn’t Killed the Manufacturing Cluster

In today's global markets, companies have many choices to procure what they need to develop, build, and sell product. So who needs a manufacturing cluster, such as Detroit? Research by Gary Pisano and Giulio Buciuni shows that in some industries, location still matters. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 29 Sep 2014

Why Do Outlet Stores Exist?

Created in the 1930s, outlet stores allowed retailers to dispose of unpopular items at fire-sale prices. Today, outlets seem outmoded and unnecessary—stores have bargain racks, after all. Donald K. Ngwe explains why outlets still exist. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

• 09 Jun 2014

The Manager in Red Sneakers

Wearing the corporate uniform may not be the best way to dress for success. Research by Silvia Bellezza, Francesca Gino, and Anat Keinan shows there may be prestige advantages when you stand out rather than fit in. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

• 06 Jan 2014

Mechanisms of Technology Re-Emergence and Identity Change in a Mature Field: Swiss Watchmaking, 1970-2008

According to most theories of technological change, old technologies tend to disappear when newer ones arrive. As this paper argues, however, market demand for old technologies may wane only to emerge again at a later point in time, as seems to be the case for products like Swiss watches, fountain pens, streetcars, independent bookstores, and vinyl records, which have all begun to claim significant market interest again. Looking specifically at watchmaking, the author examines dynamics of technology re-emergence and the mechanisms whereby this re-emergence occurs in mature industries and fields. Swiss watchmakers had dominated their industry and the mechanical watch movement for nearly two centuries, but their reign ended abruptly in the mid-1970s at the onset of the "Quartz Revolution" (also known as the "Quartz Crisis"). By 1983, two-thirds of all watch industry jobs in Switzerland were gone. More recently, however, as the field has moved toward a focus on luxury, a "re-coupling" of product, organizational, and community identity has allowed master craftsmen to continue building their works of art. The study makes three main contributions: 1) It highlights the importance of studying technology-in-practice as a lens on viewing organizational and institutional change. 2) It extends the theorization of identity to products, organizations, and communities and embeds these within cycles of technology change. 3) It suggests the importance of understanding field-level change as tentative and time-bound: This perspective may allow deeper insights into the mechanisms that propel emergence, and even re-emergence, of seemingly "dead" technologies and industries. (Read an interview with Ryan Raffaelli about his research.) Key concepts include: The value of some products may go beyond pure functionality to embrace non-functional aspects that can influence consumer buying behaviors. Introducing a new technology is not always the only way to get ahead of the curve when older technologies or industries appear to be reaching the end of their life. Industries that successfully re-emerge are able to redefine their competitive set - the group of organizations upon which they want to compete and the value proposition that they send to the consumer. There is significant interplay among community, organization, and product identities. Swiss watches—as well as fountain pens, streetcars, independent bookstores and vinyl records—are all examples of technologies once considered dead that have rematerialized to claim significant market interest. For Swiss watchmakers, "who we are" (as a community) and "what we do" (as watch producers) were mutually constitutive and may have been a potent force in the processes that sought re-coupling in the face of the de-coupling precipitated by technological change. Although new or discontinuous technologies tend to displace older ones, legacy technologies can re-emerge, coexist with, and even come to dominate newer technologies. Core to this process is the creation—and recreation—of product, organization, and community identities that resonate with the re-emergence of markets for legacy technologies. Substantial economic change may not be contained only within organizational or industry boundaries, but also extend outward to include broader forces related to field-level change. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research

• Open access
• Published: 25 December 2022

Evaluation and trend of fashion design research: visualization analysis based on CiteSpace

• Yixin Zou   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1880-6382 1 ,
• Sarawuth Pintong 2 ,
• Tao Shen 3 &
• Ding-Bang Luh 1  

Fashion and Textiles volume  9 , Article number:  45 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

9668 Accesses

4 Citations

Metrics details

Fashion or apparel refers to a topic discussed publicly as an indispensable discipline on a day-to-day basis, which has aroused rising attention from academic sessions over the past two decades. However, since the topic of fashion design covers knowledge in extensive ranges and considerable information, scholars have not fully grasped the research field of fashion design, and the research lacks directional guidance. To gain more insights into the existing research status and fronts in the fashion design field, this study conducts a quantitative literature analysis. The research of this study is conducted by employing CiteSpace technology to visualize and analyze 1388 articles regarding “fashion design” in the Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection. To be specific, the visualization and the analysis concentrate on the annual number of articles, author collaboration, institutional collaboration, literature citations, keywords clustering, and research trend evolution of the mentioned articles. As highlighted by this study, the effect of the US and the UK on academic research in fashion design is relatively stronger and extensive. Sustainable fashion refers to the research topic having aroused more attention since 2010, while new research topics over the past few years consist of “wearable fashion”, “transgender fashion” and “medical fashion”. The overall research trend of fashion design is developing as interdisciplinary cross research. This study systematically reviews the relevant literature, classifies the existing research status, research hotspots and frontier trends in the academic field of “fashion design”, and presents the knowledge map and information of literature for researchers in relevant fields.

Introduction

In academic research and writing, researchers should constantly search relevant literature to gain systematic insights into the subject area (e.g., the major research questions in the field, the seminal studies, the landmark studies, the most critical theories, methods and techniques, as well as the most serious current challenges). The process to answer the mentioned questions refers to an abstract process, which requires constant analysis, deduction and generalization. Any literature emerging over time may be critical, any research perspective may cause novel inspiration, and any detail can be the beginning of the subsequent research. However, when literature is being sorted and analyzed, if judgment only complies with personal experience, important literature will be inevitably missed, or the research direction will be lost in the research. For the process of conducting literature analysis, Hoover proposed that the quantitative methods of literature represent elements or features of literary texts numerically, applying effective, accurate and widely accepted mathematical methods to measure, classify and analyze literature quantitatively (Hoover, 2013 ). On this basis, literary data and information are more comprehensively processed. Prof. Chaomei Chen developed CiteSpace to collect, analyze, deliver and visualize literature information by creating images, diagrams or animations, thereby helping develop scientific knowledge maps and data mining of scientific literature. Knowledge visualization primarily aims to detect and monitor the existing state of research and research evolution in a knowledge field. Knowledge visualization has been exploited to explore trends in fields (e.g., medical, management science, biomedicine and biotechnology).

However, the international research situation in fashion design has not been analyzed by scholars thus far. Fashion, a category of discourse, has been arousing scholars’ attention since the late nineteenth century (Kim, 1998 ). In such an era, fashion is recognized by individuals of all classes and cultures, and it is publicly perceived. The field of fashion design is significantly correlated with people's lives (Boodro, 1990 ), and numerous nations and universities have long developed courses regarding fashion design or fashion. Besides, the development of fashion acts as a symbol of the soft power of the country. The discussion on fashion trend, fashion designer, fashion brands, artwork and other topics in the society turns out to be the hotspot discussed on a nearly day-to-day basis, and the discussion in the society even exceeds the academic research. However, the academic research of fashion design refers to a topic that cannot be ignored. The accumulation and achievements of academic research are manifested as precipitation of knowledge for developing the existing fashion field, while significantly guiding future generations. Studying the publishing situation and information in fashion design will help fashion practitioners or researchers classify their knowledge and provide them with novel inspiration or research and literature directions.

This study complies with the method of quantitative literature analysis, and CiteSpace software is adopted to analyze the literature in fashion design. Through searching web of science (WOS) Core Collection, 1388 articles regarding “fashion design” are retained. Co-citation, co-authoring and co-occurrence analysis refer to the major functions of CiteSpace. This study analyzes the articles regarding “fashion design”, and the focus is placed on the annual publication volume, author collaboration, institutional collaboration, national collaboration, literature citations, keyword co-occurrence, keyword clustering, and the research evolution, and visualized the literature and research as figures of these articles. The results here are presented as figures. This study provides the fronts knowledge, the current research status research, the hotspots and trends in fashion design research.

In this study, CiteSpace technology is adopted to analyze all collected literature data. CiteSpace, developed by Professor Chaomei Chen, an internationally renowned expert in information visualization at Drexel University, USA (Wang & Lu, 2020 ), refers to a Java application to visually analyze literature and co-citation networks (Chen, 2004 ). CiteSpace is capable of displaying burst detection, mediated centrality and heterogeneous networks regarding literate information. Visual analysis of the literature by using CiteSpace covers three functions, i.e., to identify the nature of specialized research frontiers, to label and cluster specialized research areas, as well as to identify the research trends and abrupt changes based on the data derived from the analysis. CiteSpace provides a valuable, timely, reproducible and flexible method to track the development of research trends and identify vital evidence (Chen et al., 2012 ).

To analyze the existing status of research and publications on the topic of “fashion design” in academia and different nations, the “Web of Science” (WOS) database is adopted as the data collection source here. Web of Science provides seamless access to existing and multidisciplinary information from approximately 8700 of the most extensively researched, prestigious and high-impact research journals worldwide, covering Science Citation Index (SCI) Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), as well as Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) (Wouters 2006 ). Its vital feature is that it covers all article types, e.g., author information, institutional addresses, citations and References (Wouters 2006 ). Research trends and publications in specific industry areas can be effectively analyzed.

To be specific, the “Web of Science Core Collection” database is selected in Web of Science and the indexing range includes SCI, SSCI, A&HCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, BKCI-S, BKCI-SSH, ESCI databases. This step aims to expand the search scope of journals and search a maximal amount of relevant literature. A “subject search” is adopted, covering the search title, the abstract, the author and the keywords. There have been other areas of research on clothing or textiles (e.g., textile engineering and other scientific research areas). However, in this study, to ensure that the topic of analysis is relevant, the subject search is conducted by entering “fashion design” or “Costume design” clothing design”, or “Apparel design”, and only academic research regarding fashion design is analyzed. To ensure the academic nature of the collected data, the search scope here is the “article” type. The time frame was chosen from 2000 to 2021 to analyze the publications on “fashion design” for past 21 years. After this operation, the results of the search were filtered two times. The search was conducted until September 23, 2021, and 1388 articles were retained on the whole.

All bibliographic information on the pages was exported into text format and subsequently analyzed with CiteSpace software. Retrieved publications were filtered and copies were removed in CiteSpace to ensure that the respective article is unique and unduplicated in the database. 1388 articles filtered down from 2000 to 2021 were analyzed in all time slices of 1 year, and most of the cited or TOP 50 of the respective item were selected from each slice.

Results and Discussion

Publications in the last 21 years.

The publication situation of WOS database with “fashion design” as the theme from 2000 to 2021 shown in Fig.  1 . On the whole, the number of articles published on the theme of “fashion design” is rising from 2000 to 2007, the number of articles published each year is almost identical, and the number of articles published in 2008–2009 is slightly increasing. The second wave of growth is in 2011, with an increase about 60% compared with the number of publications in 2010, and it has been rising year by year. 2017 is the peak year with a high volume of 171 publications. 2018 shows another decline, whereas over 100 publications remain. 2018, 2019 and 2020 show continuous growths again. As of September 2021, the number of publications in 2021 is 77. Although the number of articles declines in 2018, the overall number of articles over the past 2 decades is still rising. The reason for the low number of publications around year of 2000 is that fashion as a category of discourse has aroused the attention of scholars from the late nineteenth century (Kim, 1998 ). The year-on-year increase is explained as research on fashion is arousing rising attention from scholars. The significant increase in research papers regarding “fashion design” in 2016 and 2017 is that around 2016, and the fashion industry has been impacted by technological developments. Moreover, the way in which design and clothing made has incorporated considerable technological tools (e.g., 3D printing and wearable technology).

Total publications and sum of times cited from 2000 to 2021 according to the web of science. Data updated to September 2021

Author co-authorship analysis

The knowledge map of cited authors based on publication references can present information regarding influential research groups and potential collaborators (Liang, Li, Zhao, et al., 2017 ). The function of co-authorship analysis is employed in CiteSpace to detect influential research groups and potential collaborators. Citespace can calculate the most productive authors in related fields. Table 1 shows that the most productive authors, which related with fashion design theme.

The author with the maximal number of publications is Olga Gurova from Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki (Finland). Her research area has focused on consumer nationalism and patriotism, identity politics and fashion, critical approach to sustainability and wearable technology and the future. Sustainable design has been a hotspot over the past decade and continues to be discussed today, and wearable technology has been a research hotpot in recent years. Olga Gurova is in first place, thereby suggesting the attention given to the mentioned topics and studies in society and fashion area. The second ranked author is Marilyn Delong from University of Minnesota (The USA). The research area consists of Aesthetics, Sustainable apparel design, History and Material Culture, Fashion Trends, Cross-cultural Influence on Design, as well as Socio-psychological aspects of Clothing. The author with the identical number of 7 publications is Kirsi Niinimäki from Aalto University (Finland). Her research directions consist of sustainable fashion and textiles, so her focus has been on the connection between design, manufacturing systems, business models and consumption habits.

For Caroline Kipp, her research area includes modern and contemporary textile arts, decorative arts and craft, craftivism, jacquard weaving, French kashmere shawls, as well as color field painting. For Nick Rees-Roberts, his research area includes fashion film, culture and digital media. Veronica Manlow from Brooklyn College in the Koppelman School of Business (USA.) The research field consists of creative process of fashion design, organizational culture and leadership in corporate fashion brands. Kevin Almond has made a contribution to creative Pattern Cutting, Clothing/Fashion Dichotomies, Sculptural Thinking in Fashion, Fashion as Masquerade. Hazel Clark, and his research field covers fashion theory and history, fashion in China, fashion and everyday life, fashion politics and sustainment. As revealed from the organization of the authors' work institutions and nations in the table, most of the nations with the maximal frequency of publications originate from the US, thereby revealing that the US significantly supports fashion design research. In general, the research scope covers fashion design, culture, mass media, craft, marketing, humanities, technology and etc. Based on the statistics of authorship collaboration, this study indicates that scholars from the US and Finland take up the top positions in the authorship publication ranking.

Moreover, Fig.  2 shows the academic collaborations among authors, which are generated by selecting the unit of analysis, setting the appropriate thresholds. The distance between the nodes and the thickness of the links denote the level of cooperation among authors (Chen & Liu, 2020 ). The influential scholars and the most active authors have not yet developed a linear relationship with each other, and collaborative networks have been lacked. It is therefore revealed that the respective researcher forms his or her own establishment in his or her own field, whereas seldom forms collaborative relationships. Thus, this study argues that to improve the breadth and depth of the field of fashion design research, the cooperation and connections between authors should be strengthened (e.g., organizing international collaborative workshops, joint publications and academic conferences) to up-regulate the amount of knowledge output and create more possibilities for fashion research.

Author collaboration network

Institution co-authorship analysis

The number of articles issued by the respective institution and the partnership network are listed in Table 2 .

Figure  3 shows the collaborative relationships among research institutions, while the distance between nodes and the thickness of links represents the level of collaborative institutions. The size of the nodes represents the number of papers published by the institutions, while the distance between the nodes and the thickness of the links indicates the level of cooperation between the institutions.

Co-relationships between nations in “fashion design” research

As indicated from the Table 2 , most of the top ten publishing institutions are from the UK and the US, and two universities in the UK rank first and second with more than 20 publications, and most of the institutions are from the UK, thereby demonstrating that the UK's achievements and effect in the field of fashion are far more than other nations. According to the cooperation network between institutions, there are 5 main cooperation networks. First, London College of Fashion, achieving the most number of articles, and there are 8 institutions cooperating with London College of Fashion, among which the closest cooperation is with Parsons Paris Sch Art & Design in the US, whose more influential areas of articles are consumers behavior, unisex clothing, third gender, communicating sustainability, real installation, Italian fashion system, global market, local culture, knitwear and textile design, international scenario, conventional craft methodologies, innovative potential, as well as 3D software application.

The second network of partnerships concentrates on University Arts London as the central node, with frequent collaborators (e.g., Center St Martins Coll Art & Design, Loughborough University Technology, Hut Grp, Sothebys Inst Art, Project Mobile Ising Sexual Hlth, De Montfort University, University of Southampton, Royal Soc Arts, Royal Coll Art). The more influential areas of publication are: electric corset, future histories, clothing sustainability, south Asian youth culture, textile patterning technique, hybrid functional clothing, UK fashion upcycling businesses, rematerializing crafting understanding, fashion designers apprentice, design ethnography approach, developing apparel design guideline and so on.

The third collaborative network is formed by Aalto University, DongHua University, University Southern Denmark, and other institutions, with more influential publications below: haring clothe; fashion designer; Chinese ethnic minority; design recipe; clothing carbohydrate binge; training design researcher; fashion design; traditional handicraft, etc.

The fourth cooperation network consists of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Ryerson University, Queensland University of Technology, Tsinghua University, York University, Art Comm China Fashion Associate, and other institutions. The influential publications areas are: Zhongshan suit; creative application; clothing design; Chinese male; medical moment; menswear design preference; cross-national study; aesthetic aspect; evaluative criteria; disease prevention.

The fifth network organized by University Minnesota Sch Design, Seoul Natl University, Cornell University, University Calif Davis, University North Carolina Greensboro, Colorado State University and others, with the influential research areas if sustainable apparel design practice, sustainable clothing, female users’ perspective, up-cycling design process; apparel design education; strategic ambiguity effective instructional tool, as well as apparel design.

It is noteworthy that: (1) although the University of Leeds has the maximal number of papers, it has not formed a collaborative network with the University of Leeds in the analysis of collaborative relationships; UK institutions have achieved prominent research results, but in the analysis of the number of author papers, and most of the authors with more papers originate from the US. In brief, British institutions, especially university institutions, generally achieve a high level of research, whereas there are fewer authors with a particularly high number of publications. (2) Asian culture covering South Asian youth culture and Chinese fashion culture appear 3 times in the research network as one of the important research areas that combine fashion and culture. (3) Moreover, the respective sub-network has exchanges and cooperation with universities or institutions from other nations, whereas the distance between the sub-networks is long. It indicates that the self-networks have not yet formed a unified network structure among each other, and are only active within their own groups. The issuing institutions that enter the top ten are nearly universities, which acts as the main power of academic articles punishment, and few other institutions (e.g., companies or social organizations). Accordingly, the cooperation between institutions should be boosted. It is necessary to exploit their strengths and advantages, expand the research field and research scope, and make more contributions to the research on “fashion design” topic.

Country co-authorship analysis

Table 3 lists the studies status on “fashion design” in different nations. The US has the maximal number of publications with 257 articles, followed by the UK with 226 articles.

Figure  4 shows the co-relationships between differently nations. The nodes in the Fig.  4 represent nations, and their sizes indicate the number of articles from different nations. The distance between the nodes and the thickness of the links represents the level of cooperation between nations. The purple rings of the purple nodes indicate high centrality, which means that the mentioned nodes are key points connecting different parts of the network. The thicker the purple ring, the higher the centrality of that node. With the U.S. as the centrality degree, it links France, Lebanon, Scotland, Nigeria, Italy, Ireland, South Korea, Thailand, England, the People’s Republic of China, Sweden, Turkey, Canada, Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, Australia, 17 nations in total. With the U.S. as the centrality degree, it links France, Italy, Brazil, Scotland, Denmark, Thailand, South Africa, Turkey, Australia, Sweden, Wales, the People’s Republic of China, North Ireland, Sweden, Canada, Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, Egypt, America, a total of 22 nations are linked. Although the previous information on the volume of publications by institutions shows that institutions in the UK nations are dominant. However, the total volume of publications compared, the US is higher than the UK, thereby demonstrating that some other institutions or organizations besides universities also contribute to the volume of publications. Furthermore, as revealed from the degree of crossover of the cooperation network in Fig.  5 , except for the UK and the US, there is but not close cooperation and connection between other nations, the nodes are far away, and the more prominent node centers are the US and the UK. This leads to the conclusion that nations should strengthen the intensity and density of cooperation and enhance their influence in fashion design research.

Linking relationships between nations

Cited references network among the literature

As indicated from the analysis of the previous network of authors, collaborating institutions and collaborating nations, the research results are more superior in the US and the UK. However, given the research statistics issued by WOW Travel in 2019, the top 10 influential nations in the field of fashion consist of the USA, the UK, Italy, France, Japan, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, the People' Republic of China, including Korea. This phenomenon is likely to be attributed to the different language systems of nations other than the UK and the US, and that some of the mentioned nations have their own search databases for articles. For this reason, the publication data are not retrieved. Other nations should actively publish in English or international academic journals to expand their effect on the international research field, not only in fashion trends or arts work creation.

Co-scholar study based on cited references

The literature can be termed a knowledge base, as well as a source of knowledge and ideas. A novel research cannot be outputted without the contribution of knowledge from previous authors, as well as the insights into and mastery of the literature. Co-scholar analysis builds a literature co-citation network by selecting several representative studies as the object of analysis. Vital references in a specific research area can be detected, and a knowledge graph of cited authors by complying with published references can present information regarding influential research field and knowledge. Table 4 shows the most distribution of the references in fashion design theme. Figure  5 is an analysis of the highly cited literature network. Describe and summarize the high-cited literature based on the information in the two charts.

The node density is 0.00313 for cited reference network, thereby illustrating that fewer links and co-citations among the literature. For the citation status of the respective literature, the analysis begins with the work of Fletcher Kate, appearing more frequently in the table, Fletcher Kate’s 2016 book “ Craft of use: post-growth fashion ” pertains to label 0 “fashion system”. The book explores “craft of use”, using ingenious ideas and practices to make garments/fabrics present as an alternative, dynamic, experiential framework for articulating and promoting sustainability in the fashion world (Fletcher, 2016 ). Fletcher, 2012 and Fletcher and Tham, 2014 pertain to the identical cluster 6. Fletcher Kate’s 2012 “ Fashion Sustainability ” counting 12 times, with ranking No.1 in Table 4 . The book’s contents about fashion sustainability in three main parts, i.e., fashion products, fashion system, as well as fashion design practice (Fletcher, 2012 ). According to the graph, Fletcher Kate's book exhibits a high frequency in the citation network and overall citation. The book from Fletcher ( 2008 ) talking about sustainable fashion and clothing, which has the second maximal citation, frequency of 9. The book is primarily concerned with sustainable fashion and sustainable design. Routledge handbook of sustainability and fashion, published in 2014. The major contents focus on sustainability, and fashion recognizes the complexity of aligning fashion with sustainability. It explores fashion and sustainability at the levels of products, processes and paradigms, while employing a truly multi-disciplinary approach to critically question and suggest creative responses to issues, i.e., Fashion in a post-growth society, Fashion, diversity and equity, Fashion, fluidity and balance across natural, social and economic systems, social sciences, arts and humanities interested in sustainability and fashion (Fletcher and Tham, 2014 ). Fletcher Kate made prominent contributions to fashion sustainable design and sustainable development.

The third most frequently cited book is Manzini’s ( 2015 ) book " Design, When Everybody Designs ", with eight citations. It presents Design and social Innovation, Collaborative organizations and encounters, Design ways and Design for novel cultures (Manzini, 2015 ). The ideas of social innovation design and sustainable design are presented.

The journal of “You are what you wear: How plus-size fashion figures in fat identity formation” from Lauren Downing Peters, takes up the third place in terms of frequency of citations. The research regarding fat identities are formed through the intimate practices of self-fashioning and via social channels (e.g., shopping and fashion blogging), thereby bridging the fields of fat studies and fashion studies. It also considers issues of performativity and is reflected as a situated bodily practice. Fashion design is combined with humanistic care (Peters, 2014 ).

The book Fashion and Culture: Cultural Studies, Fashion Studies, from SB Kaiser, 2012 be cited 7 times. The main topic is the integration of fashion, design and culture (Kaiser, 2012 ). Jenss ( 2016 ), Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites, and Practices , is cited 6 times. The book explores fashion in wide-ranging contexts by stressing material culture and ethnographic approaches in fashion studies. Ryan ( 2014 ), Garments of Paradise: Wearable Discourse in the Digital Age, research about the wearable fashion based on the new era (Ryan, 2014 ). Fashion design industry impressions of current sustainable practices , 2014, Noël Palomo-Lovinski, the article explores professional fashion designers' understanding and awareness of current sustainable design (Palomo-Lovinski & Hahn, 2014 ).

As revealed from the analysis of the co-cited literature, the literature and research areas arousing more attention in the fashion design area from 2009 to 2016 consist of fashion sustainable design and sustainable development, fashion humanities, fashion design strategies, wearable technology, fashion and culture, and Chinese fashion.

Co-occurrence analysis for the research frontier and trends

Hot research topics.

A research hotspot refers to a research issue or topic explored by a relatively large number of articles that are intrinsically linked within a certain period. The keywords are the authors' high distillation and summary of the core content of the article, reflecting the research value and direction of the article. Keywords achieving high frequency are generally exploited to identify the hot issues in a research field. The noun phrases extracted from the article can also represent the hotspot of research in a particular field to a certain extent. Clustering analysis of keywords is performed by CiteSpace software to generate keyword clustering knowledge graphs (Hu et al., 2019 ). The mentioned clusters reflect the last 21 years of topics in fashion design research (shown in Fig.  6 ).

Co-citation clusters about “fashion design” theme

The silhouette scores of the major cluster that were focused on in the review were sufficiently high. Analyzing the size of clusters by Silhouette and size, and the cluster labels could be defined by log-likelihood ratio (LLR) to explain the term contained in. The top 10 keywords in the respective cluster are summarized in the Table 5 .

As indicated from the analysis of the keywords in the respective cluster, the research content of the respective cluster overlaps with each other. However, international research in the “fashion design” field can be summarized as eight major research fields: “Skill/Tools/Technologies/Material with fashion innovation”, “Wearing class and Art”, “Sustainable fashion”, “fashion design/ fashion designer and arts work”,” Education”, “fashion industry and business”, “fashion with culture”, “Medical fashion”.

(1) Skill/ Technologies/Materials with fashion design innovation. The common label that appears are: Wearable new materialism; technological innovation, wearable technologies, future mode, digital exploration, digital design, technological innovation, smart material systems. Promoted by the rapid development of society and science and technology, interdisciplinary learning and research has also emerged in the fashion industry. Innovative design, fabric innovation or innovative display combined with high-tech, novel materials and virtual or digital industries turns out to be a novel topic of great interest in the fashion industry (Barati, Karana, & Hekkert, 2019 ; Burns, 2022 ; Bower & Sturman, 2015 ; Chuah, Rauschnabel, Krey, et al., 2016 ; Feng, 2020 ; Ferrara, 2019 ; Huang, Tang, Liu, et al., 2018 ; Juhlin, 2015 ; Rocamora, 2017 ; Smelik, 2018 ; Smelik et al., 2016 ; Ünay & Zehir, 2012 ).

(2) Wearing culture and Arts. The common labels consist of dressing strategies, transgender fashion, men fashion, human right, accessorizing bodyscape, popular art, applied art. It focuses on different types of people, human rights and humanistic concerns, including unisex fashion. The collection is designed and worn with a mix of different arts, cultures and trends, as well as regional dress cultures, such as Chinese. The collection is inclusive of fashion and highly integrated with art (Chance, Camilleri, Winstone, et al., 2016 ; Geczy & Karaminas, 2011 ; Hancock, Johnson-Woods, & Karaminas, 2013 ; Martin, 1999 ; Mocenco, Olaru, Popescu, et al., 2016 ; Nelson & Hwang, 2019 ; Sabine Linke, 2013 ; Tullio-Pow, Yaworski, & Kincaid, 2021 ; Vainshtein, 2012 ).

(3) Sustainable fashion. Including the labels of sustainability knowledge, sustainable fashion, sustainable practice, communicating sustainability, sustainability knowledge, sustainable consumption, etc. Sustainable development and sustainability are a hotspot of discussion in academia. Sustainable fashion, i.e., Eco-fashion, refers to part of a growing design philosophy and sustainable design trend aiming to create a sustainable system capable of supporting environmental, socially responsible and sociocultural aspects (Aakko & Koskennurmi-Sivonen, 2013 ; De Brito, Carbone, & Blanquart, 2008 ; Fletcher, 2013 ; Gordon & Hill, 2015 ; Gwilt, 2020 ; Henninger, Alevizou, & Oates, 2016 ; Lundblad & Davies, 2016 ; Mukendi, Davies, Glozer, & McDonagh, 2020 ; Niinimäki, 2013 ; Shen, 2014 ; Wang & Lu, 2020 ).

(4) Fashion design, fashion designer and arts work. As the fundamental topic in fashion design field, the labels consist of design strategies, young fashion designer, costume design, South Korean contemporary fashion design, China fashion design, etc. Is the research about the characteristics of fashion in different historical stages, region, area, culture and style study (Bugg, 2009 ; Chang & Lee, 2021 ; Creigh-Tyte, 2005 ; Kawamura, 2004 ; Kim & Farrell-Beck, 2005 ; Larner & Molloy, 2009 ; Ling et al., 2016 ; Millspaugh & Kent, 2016 ; Park, 1993 ; Sterlacci, 2019 ).

(5) Education. Responsible fashion business education, teaching system, fashion design course, interactive teaching, fashion entrepreneurship education, etc. Educational methods have constantly been a vital topic required to be discussed, and teaching methods and concepts have been reformed and innovated to respond to social and economic development, as well as to the constant innovation of knowledge, skills and cultural heritage (Armstrong & LeHew, 2013 ; Faerm, 2012 ; Fletcher, 2013 ; Lee & Sohn, 2011 ; Stensaker, 2007 ).

(6) Fashion industry and business. In modern commodity society, the concept of fashion is more than a way of life and an inner state of mind. People's pursuit of fashion will change the existing mode of life and behavior, thereby constantly creating new demands. Accordingly, the emergence of new products is promoted, as well as the development of novel industries. Fashion products are not only characterized by commercial products, but also help create a fashion industry chain and huge economic benefits for its high added value, easy dissemination and wide circulation (Guercini & Runfola, 2010 ; Pal & Gander, 2018 ; Pedersen, Gwozdz, & Hvass, 2018 ; Şen, 2008 ; Shamsuzzoha, Kankaanpaa, Carneiro, et al., 2013 ; Todeschini, Cortimiglia, Callegaro-de-Menezes, & Ghezzi, 2017 ).

(7) Fashion with culture. The labels include cultural heritage, traditional craft methodologies, new vision, cultural identity, cultural knowledge, etc. Understanding the effect of culture on the fashion industry and design creation gives insight into the style of fashion people want. For the identical reason, fashion impacts the way we live. Fashion is impacted by changes in culture (e.g., modernization, art, and even innovative technology). It is noteworthy that fashion is created by people living in different cultures and places. If one wants to understand fashion, one should be aware of the cultures of different places (e.g., traditional cultures, cultural heritage, new cultural contexts, and cross-cultural exchanges) (Fillin-Yeh, 2001 ; Jansen, 2014 ; Ko & Lee, 2011 ; Roche, 1996 ; Rocamora, 2017 ; Woodside & Ko, 2013 ; Zou and Joneurairatana, 2020a , b ).

(8) Medical fashion, the labels (e.g., mask making, world view, disease prevention, wearable development and fashioning masks). The medical area fashion is listed as a separate field because of the specificity and timing of this field. Since the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020, the concern for health and disease worldwide has become an essential topic, and almost every research area has a connection with medical care, as impacted by such a general trend and environment, led to developments in the field of “medical care fashion” (e.g., the development of new materials, masks and protective fashion). In addition, due to the development of “human centred design” thinking, the current fashion industry not only pays attention to the creation of artistic works, but also pays more attention to humanistic care. The needs of special groups have also attracted the attention of the fashion industry, such as disabled people, etc. (Kim, et al., 2021 ; Koenig & Carnes, 1999 ; Li & Yim, 2021 ).

Keywords with the strongest citation bursts

Keywords with the strongest citation Bursts can be exploited to reflect the main research content of a research topic over time, and also to reflect the research trends in a certain time period. The tracking and identification of research trends can offer researchers information regarding the changes in research hotspots in the field of specialization, and can provide relevant inspiration and information for researchers in the field. Research frontiers are emerging theoretical trends and new topics that can be synthesized and judged in CiteSpace based on analysis of keywords with the strongest citation bursts (Li & Wang, 2018 ).

After running the CiteSpace software, 13 keywords with maximal citation bursts were obtained (shown in Fig.  7 ).

Top 13 keywords with the strongest citation bursts in “fashion design” area

In this study, the research scope is selected from 2000 to 2021, and the strongest citation bursts are concentrated after 2010. The mentioned consist of identity, culture, fashion trend, popular culture, design process, education, design practice, craft, etc. Moreover, the analysis of the strongest citation bursts complies with the following noteworthy points:

The topic of sustainable fashion has burst on the scene three times over the last decade, i.e., in 2015 for “sustainable design”, in 2015 for “sustainability”, as well as in 2018 for “sustainable fashion”. The evolution of sustainable fashion can be identified in the shift from “sustainable production” to “sustainable fashion” concepts. In the wake of the world's biggest ever garment industry disaster, the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, having caused death of over 1100 people (Rahman, 2014 ) the fashion movement by complying with the concept of “sustainability” is fading massively, which reveals an increased interest in sustainable fashion and ethical practices in the fashion industry (Westervelt, 2015 ). As sustainability turns out to be a “megatrend” (Mittelstaedt, Shultz, Kilbourne, et al., 2014 ), the fashion field has changed dramatically in accordance with the concept of “sustainable fashion” (e.g., sustainable design, fabrics, production and consumption) (Watson & Yan, 2013 ; Mora et al., 2014 ). Moreover, today sustainable fashion refers to a movement and process facilitating the transformation of fashion products and fashion systems towards greater ecological integrity and social justice. Sustainable fashion is not only concerned with fashion textiles or products, but concerned with the dependent social, cultural, ecological and financial systems correlated with people.

Research rends and frontier on fashion design

The identification and tracking of research frontiers present researchers with the latest developments in the disciplinary research evolution, predicts the trends in the research field, and identifies issues required to be explored more specifically. Research frontier topics are novel topics of interest in the field, indicating the social environment and research context. In brief, it can be referenced for relevant researchers in this field.

After CiteSpace is run, keyword timing profiles are generated by time segment based on Cluster co-occurrence analysis (shown in Fig.  8 ).

Time zone view in fashion design research

From the time zone view, the research in fashion design can fall into four phrases. The first phrase is that the research situation before 2004 did not form a cluster, thereby indicating that the research on fashion design was scattered before 2004. The second phrase is from 2004 to 2010, thereby revealing that the term of “international modernism” appeared twice. It can be explained by the frequent cross-cultural exchange activities between nations. The research emphasis shifts from fashion research in the traditional sense (e.g., apparel characteristics, designer and design styles) to cross-cultural and regionally fashion culture research (e.g., China, Europe, and the US). The third phase is from 2011 to 2017, more clusters appear in this time period, thereby demonstrating a higher volume of articles published. The research topics in fashion design show a diversity of clusters keywords and a wider range of research directions (e.g., culture, regional fashion, traditional apparel, humanities, education, design approaches and techniques). The fourth stage is from 2017 to the present, the keywords of clusters are more obvious, especially the label around 2017: “wearable technologies”. The mentioned keywords include wearable technology, wearable devices, fashion technology, smart wear, and technology socks. This novel technology is “skin electronics” or “fashion electronics”, which are intelligent electronic devices worn near or on the skin surface to detect, analyze and transmit information regarding the body information, body signals, vital signs or environmental data and others; in several cases, the information can be delivered to the wearer (Chuah, Rauschnabel, Krey, et al., 2016 ; Çiçek, 2015 ; Farrington, 2016 ). The second label is “Transgender Fashion”, unisex fashion, embodies the humanistic nature of fashion. Moreover, the label in 2021 is concerned with “Medical Moment”. With the global outbreak of Covid-19, how to against the virus is the daily topic be concerned by global. Protective clothing, mask has become a necessity in people's lives. Based on this context, the fashion industry has also been affected. The fashion industry think more about the care and needs of the human body, “Medical fashion” has become a popular topic of research. As indicated from the academic view, the research direction of fashion design is closer to the society hot trends and interdisciplinary research. Caring for people's physical, physiological and psychological aspects, fashion research tends to be more human centred design.

Conclusions

By analyzing the frontiers and trends of fashion design research, this study reveals that at the beginning of the research period, the topics of academic research were biased towards research in the humanities (e.g., fashion design, designers, culture, humanistic care, locality, as well as arts work). The direction of research over the past few years has been impacted by the overall global dynamics as well as technological and economic development, thereby demonstrating that the trend of interdisciplinary and cross-border cooperation has entered a stage of development in recent years. The data collection and analysis time of this article is at the end of 2021, but with the development of time and science and technology, such as Digital fashion, Virtual fashion, AI design, Inclusive design, etc. have also become hot topics at the moment. The researcher believe it will produce more academic research in fashion design in the future time.

On the whole, research on the topic of fashion design still has a considerable scope for research. Scholars, designers and practitioners in the fashion field still face huge task. Accordingly, the researcher proposed several suggestions for how to strengthen the process and results of academic research. From a horizontal perspective, (1) the international academic community and researchers should enhance the interact, discuss and conduct collaborative research with each other to provide sustainable vitality and motivation for the research; (2) transnational, cross-unit and cross-border academic exchange and cooperation should be enhanced to create more possibilities for academic research; (3) additional, multilingual journal platforms should be offered for fashion or art fields. From vertical perspective: Combining or contrasting history with modernity. For instance, using new technologies to redesign or study historical apparel, etc. By combining traditional culture with modern technology, the scope of the time-line of fashion design research can be extended.

This study uses quantitative literature analysis to convey information from the literature by creating images, diagrams and information description. The existing state of research in fashion design is reviewed, and provide the knowledge base, the existing state of research, as well as research hot-spots and publication trends in fashion design research. This study can provide existing literature, knowledge map, new inspirations, and research directions to fashion practitioners, researchers, and research institutions. Based on this paper, scholars can efficiently familiarize the field knowledge and facilitate strategic adjustments by relevant institutions.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets supporting the research process and conclusions of this article are included within the additional files. For databases and research results, which is available and has no restrictions to its use by academics or non-academics.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to the Design Science and Art Research Center from Guangdong University of Technology, for providing the research facilities and environment for this study.

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YZ: Postdoctor, School of Art and Design, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510062, China.

SP: Lecturer and Ph.D., Ph.D in Culture-based Design Arts Program, Faculty of Decorative Arts, Silpakorn Univeristy, Bangkok 10170, Thailand.

TS: Postdoctor, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China.

D-BL: Professor and Ph.D., School of Art and Design, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510062, China.

This research was received financial support from “Science and Technology Program of Guangdong Province: Overseas Famous Master Project” Guangdong province, China. The Project No. is 2020A1414010314.

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YXZ conceived the ideas, experimental design, data analization, interpretation of the results, and drafted the manuscript of the analysis. SP and ST gave technical guidance and provided continuous support to perform the experiment successfully,and gave the suggestions about the writing. DBL contributed to the interpretation of the results and revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Zou, Y., Pintong, S., Shen, T. et al. Evaluation and trend of fashion design research: visualization analysis based on CiteSpace. Fash Text 9 , 45 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40691-022-00316-6

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Fashion Studies In-between: A Methodological Case Study and an Inquiry into the State of Fashion Studies

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Case Study | Inside Hermès’ Best-in-Class Leather Goods Strategy

• Robert Williams

Key insights

• Hermès’ singular strategy for leather goods has allowed it to create stability and self-determination in a fast-moving, competitive fashion market.
• Insiders often see Hermès as an outlier: The brand can do things differently, it’s sometimes said, simply because “it’s Hermès.” But its singular approach is, in many ways, the source of its strength as much as the result of it.
• BoF’s latest deep-dive case study unpacks how the French company has grown into a luxury powerhouse with €12 billion in annual sales, offering lessons for brands at every scale.

In February 1993, Hermès floated its shares on the Paris Bourse at less than €6 each. By April 2023, its stock price had soared to more than €2,000 per share, lifting the company’s market capitalisation to €210 billion ($226 billion), surpassing Nike, the world’s biggest fashion brand by revenue with annual sales almost four times higher than Hermès. It was the latest endorsement by markets of the French label’s best-in-class leather goods strategy, which investors believe will continue to deliver steady growth and high profitability for years to come.

In this case study, The Business of Fashion dives deep into the unique product assortment, supply chain , communications and retail strategies that have powered Hermès’ rise as a global leader in the core handbag category . Even as the company seized rising demand for French luxury goods worldwide to grow annual sales exponentially — from around €588 million at the time of its public listing to €11.6 billion in 2022 — Hermès has retained, and even enhanced, an exclusive positioning anchored in the quality and scarcity of its flagship leather goods, including its famous Birkin and Kelly models.

While Hermès has surfed the same waves of luxury growth as competitors like Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci and Dior, the company sets itself apart with a highly differentiated leather goods strategy. The brand retains its focus on top-price leather accessories, limiting cheaper-to-produce canvas lines that are a key profit driver for rivals, and prioritises top-quality, traditional manufacturing techniques over short-term growth. Unlike competitors, the company shuns assembly-line production and continues to train its leatherworkers to stitch bags by hand. “The real quality control of Hermès is the pride of the person who makes the bag,” chief executive Axel Dumas has said.

The approach has created scarcity that frustrates many would-be consumers of the brand’s bags. But this singular insistence on centuries-old standards has proven highly successful: Even as the company has expanded production at a stable pace for styles like the Birkin and Kelly (now accounting for over €2 billion in annual revenue, according to Bernstein estimates) their scarcity relative to demand has made shoppers only want them more.

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The quality and scarcity of Hermès’ flagship bags are just part of its unique approach. While rival brands have courted visibility through image-making couture, logo-driven merchandising, celebrity marketing and digital influencers , Hermès has preserved a more discreet image. Hermès historically kept quiet about its prestigious leather goods, instead focusing its advertisements on more accessible categories like silk scarves and perfume. Though its communication strategy has shifted somewhat, the company still largely relies on devoted customers to spread its leather-goods lore by word-of-mouth.

In a traditionally top-down luxury industry whose retail operations usually pivot around consistency and centralised control, Hermès has opted for a decentralised approach that gives store managers and sales associates an unusual degree of power over how and to whom its prestigious leather goods are sold, putting personal relationships with clients at the heart of the business.

The results have been staggering: Hermès is the world’s third-biggest luxury fashion brand by revenue (after Louis Vuitton and Chanel) as well as luxury’s most-profitable listed entity with an operating margin above 40 percent. A track record of weathering industry-wide crises better than rivals, like 2008′s global financial crisis or the Covid-19 pandemic, and quickly bouncing back, has made the company’s stock among the world’s most desirable investments, trading at over 60 times estimated earnings per share.

The company’s performance has allowed it to maintain the confidence of its controlling shareholders — the descendants of Thierry Hermès, now in their sixth generation of ownership — and fend off a takeover attempt by LVMH. Meanwhile, collectors on the secondary market continue to pay as much as three times retail prices for popular Hermès bags, a testament to their perceived exclusivity and desirability.

Looking ahead, Hermès faces challenges including managing unprecedented scale and a burgeoning resale market — both of which put pressure on the brand’s reputation for scarcity — as well as a digital media landscape populated by users attempting to demystify the “Hermès game,” a viral moniker for clients’ relationships with the sales associates who determine who gets to buy the brand’s bags. To protect its independence, the company will need to keep up its strong performance to convince shareholders the business hasn’t passed its prime. Further diversifying its leather goods business beyond Kelly and Birkin is a key opportunity, as is its still-nascent beauty business, which offers the company a means to reach customers at lower price points.

This case study breaks down Hermès’ leather goods success, showing how the company protects and grows its hero category while creating stability, profitability and self-determination in a fast-moving, competitive luxury fashion market — offering lessons for brands at every scale.

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Robert Williams is Luxury Editor at the Business of Fashion. He is based in Paris and drives BoF’s coverage of the dynamic luxury fashion sector.

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Jumpstarting value creation with data and analytics in fashion and luxury

The COVID-19 crisis is first and foremost a humanitarian crisis, but its economic impacts are far-reaching. Fashion is no exception: apparel companies lost 90 percent of their profits in 2020, according to the McKinsey Global Fashion Index . Consumer confidence plummeted during the pandemic, and it has yet to recover.

Data will be the key to unlocking the insights needed to adapt to change and to reengage customers in the coming months and years. Yet the pandemic has exposed a major shortfall in data gathering and analysis across much of the industry. The gap between data leaders and laggards has widened: some data-savvy fashion and luxury companies have dramatically increased their market value, while others have lost ground to competitors. Indeed, the 25 top-performing retailers—most of which epitomize the powerful shift to digital, data, and analytics—represent more than 90 percent of the sector’s increase in global market capitalization during the pandemic.

Simply put, the sooner fashion and luxury companies learn to harness the power of data, the better.

Data gold mines in the value chain

Data are more abundant than ever—and the COVID-19 crisis has made the case for building data capability even more pressing. The fashion and luxury firms that are likely to come out of the crisis stronger than before are tapping into their data to stay a step ahead.

The use cases for data and analytics are varied, numerous, and fairly well known, but where to focus along the value chain isn’t always intuitive. The challenge often lies in pinpointing where and how to integrate data into the business in a cross-functional way, and building the appropriate operating model to do so. Over the past 12 months, we’ve seen fashion companies navigate and extract value across the whole value chain.

Fashion companies that have harnessed the power of data to personalize customer e-commerce experiences have grown digital sales by between 30 and 50 percent.

In particular, fashion and luxury companies that have integrated data into their planning, merchandising, and supply-chain processes have seen tangible results. Data-driven decisions around stock and store optimization have increased sales by 10 percent. And enhancing visibility throughout the supply chain has streamlined inventory management, improved returns forecasting, and optimized transport networks—reducing inventory costs by up to 15 percent. Most significantly, fashion companies that have harnessed the power of data to personalize customer e-commerce experiences have grown digital sales by between 30 and 50 percent (Exhibit 1).

While it is evident that data and analytics can unlock significant value in e-commerce sales, the potential for improving physical sales should not be ignored. In an omnichannel world like the one we are heading toward in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, businesses need the flexibility to respond and adjust to shifting customer preferences. As pandemic-related restrictions ease, physical sales may pick up again. Data capabilities are relevant for getting the omnichannel model right.

Four pillars for building data capabilities in fashion and luxury

Data are a precious resource. Leaving such information untapped leaves value on the table. Fashion and luxury companies can build four critical capabilities to unlock their data’s value: strategy and use-case battlegrounds, data architecture and platforms, governance and operating model, and talent and culture.

Define the data strategy and prioritize the ‘battlegrounds’

The data journey starts with setting a vision for how data will support business goals over the next two to four years. A shorter horizon may be too shortsighted and not ambitious enough for fashion and luxury businesses. Any longer, and time to impact makes the upfront investment untenable. This vision-setting process is best led by a chief data officer (CDO), someone senior in the organization who can champion the change through the many competing business priorities. The data journey is a collaborative process including most executives, since use cases hit so many parts of the value chain. The CDO translates that vision into a set of core priority business domains—the company’s data and analytics “battlegrounds”—and defines specific use cases for each priority domain.

The following example brings this process to life: A leading digital-native fashion marketplace declared “size and fit” its top data and analytics battleground. The firm created a team of researchers, data scientists, and engineers embedded in the merchandising and product teams to solve the persistent returns–fit-optimization problem. The firm defined the initial size-curve buy as a single use case and set out to make it a much more data-driven and dynamic decision.

Customer personalization should be on every fashion player’s data and analytics road map, as this is table stakes today. A leading sports-apparel retailer developed an ambitious data vision to power one-to-one relationships with consumers through data-driven personalized experiences. The firm collects huge volumes of data generated from customer-facing apps that enable it to offer more targeted and personalized experiences. The firm has also acquired predictive analytics platforms that forecast the behavior and lifetime value of customers, among other capabilities. Personalization as a battleground has enabled this retailer to develop a whole series of use cases to drive one-to-one engagement with customers.

The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated technology use along the value chain, significantly increasing the ‘data footprint’

The pandemic has catalyzed the adoption of many tech tools across the fashion and luxury value chain. For example, many brands and wholesalers have adopted buying platforms such as JOOR or NuORDER, use enhanced digital-imaging tools including ORDRE or Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and use 3-D design tools such as Backbone, Optitex, and Browzwear to help improve the product-design process.

These tools not only boost digitization of key processes but also significantly improve the quality and quantity of the data generated—which in turn accelerate the quality of the insights gleaned.

Other fashion companies have personalized their customers’ e-commerce journeys, and in doing so have been able to offer customers what they want when they want it and build brand loyalty. Data and analytics applications have helped these companies to optimize assortment, reduce returns, and launch new brands (see sidebar “The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated technology use along the value chain, significantly increasing the ‘data footprint’”). Building a personalized interaction with customers across multiple channels has led to a 20 percent increase in revenue, and companies that have used data to optimize price have also been able to increase margins by up to 10 percent (Exhibit 2).

Invest in data architecture and platforms aligned with ‘battlegrounds’

Modern fashion data architectures handle core retail day-to-day data sets that are large and unstructured, such as SKUs, sales, point-of-sale (POS) transactions, stock transactions, e-commerce touchpoints, customer 360 information, and radio-frequency identification (RFID). The truth is, most fashion and luxury companies have expensive legacy systems built on inflexible, nonscalable, and limited data warehouses that cannot integrate new data sources.

Most turn to data lakes as a solution, which serves as the organization’s single source of truth and features several layers for data consumption. However, modern data architectures must evolve  across all layers, drawing on new architectural paradigms including cloud-based data platforms, serverless and containerized data platforms and applications, no-SQL databases, flexible data schemas, and solutions that provide real-time data-processing capabilities.

To picture these innovations in practice, consider the following example: A leading fashion player built a new data architecture, and most of the company’s databases and systems have been migrated in the past three to four years. This retailer made a significant investment to develop a massive multilayer data lake in the private cloud and consolidate hundreds of internal and external data repositories. In addition, the retailer set up a data-architecture lab and is continually experimenting with new data tools to support and improve performance. For instance, the firm recently deployed a real-time data-streaming platform to power a wide range of business use cases across its priority domains of digital personalization and real-time supply-chain management. Thanks to these efforts, it has achieved processing power of several petabytes of data per hour, enabling a rapid response to market changes while also acquiring the capacity to identify trending products and introduce them earlier than competitors.

However, many fashion and luxury companies fall into blind investment traps. Too often, the CDO will ask for the freedom to get the data fixed before committing to value creation through data use cases. It’s a common fallacy. Successful fashion players scale data-platform investments alongside real value delivery. This phased approach allows firms to pace investment as the benefits materialize—saving on upfront investment. Firms that get this right typically invest in the resources they need to deliver the first set of use cases, and then build on this in an incremental way, ensuring development of road-tested assets (in particular, data protocols, ontologies, models, and data products) to ensure faster time to market with every new use case.

Define a high-performing data and analytics operating model

Data management is often the Achilles’ heel of many fashion and luxury companies. The absence of high-quality data and clean taxonomies, and the general lack of common language and understanding around data across the organization, wreak havoc when starting on an analytics journey. This could not be more true for core data sets; data from POS transactions, for example, are a mix of structured and unstructured data and include sensitive personal information such as credit card numbers. And SKU–product data, which is key to managing integrated omnichannel stock, typically comes with unstandardized formats from suppliers, generating a need for tight master-data management and integration of several merchandising and vendor-management systems.

Fashion companies have tackled the problem by setting up a value-backed data-operating-model framework  across 20 to 30 data domains—such as sales, stock, and store transactions, among others—that have a clear owner in each business unit. These owners are best placed to define what kind of information is needed from various business functions and understand what such data can measure. They can also work collaboratively to ensure that the organization has a uniform definition of data and put processes in place to monitor data quality. Ownership is important, as it builds the mindset that the process of getting data right is not just an IT issue, but it is critical for decision making across the organization.

A leading integrated omnichannel fast-fashion player followed this approach, with tangible results. The firm defined a data-governance framework—including roles, responsibilities, and processes—to improve data quality and build an understanding of key data sets necessary to provide insight and enhance decision making. The firm set up teams responsible for developing tools or sets of use cases for the business, and those same teams were also responsible for defining and integrating data governance. The firm saw a 50 percent improvement in data quality, measured as compliance with business-defined data-quality rules.

A more sophisticated solution is to use machine-learning algorithms to improve data quality in key data assets such as customer information. For instance, fashion retailers have used pattern-recognition algorithms to eliminate duplicates in customer databases. And other machine-learning techniques such as data imputation and natural language processing can improve demand forecasting (Exhibit 3).

Develop talent and build a data and analytics culture

Many fashion and luxury companies have taken the leap of upskilling their workforces and reinventing talent and culture practices. We see fashion companies grabbing talent from academia, digital natives, and start-ups; few build their bench purely in-house. However, talent is often hidden in plain sight. Some leading businesses have found success with data academies to train new data professionals—such as data architects, data scientists, and data stewards—and ensure that core decision makers, such as designers, merchandising teams, and e-commerce teams, can translate data and analytics to fit business needs. A data culture that not only accepts data-driven insights and modeling, but also is hungry for it, is critical to get value from the data investment. Too many fashion companies make the leap only to find the business is stuck in old ways of working, and these firms tend to view data and analytics with an unfair amount of skepticism .

How to get started and shape a winning data road map

How a north american fast-fashion firm turned to data in a crisis.

In March 2020, stores across the United States closed overnight, sales plummeted by 80 percent, and a leading fast-fashion player was sitting on inventory locked in the back rooms of its stores. The firm had a few months of runway and was facing bankruptcy.

Fast on their feet, executives at the company created three cross-functional teams to accelerate one-to-one personalized marketing, launch ship-from-store, and mine merchandising insights using the rich data they were getting from their online channel. In weeks, the firm was operating in a fundamentally different way—testing and learning, driving data-backed actions, and making decisions as a cohesive unit.

The business also avoided massive discounting as other apparel retailers raced to the bottom through promotional offers. Instead, the firm canceled its fall-season orders and was able to quickly respond to the at-home casual trends that were gaining momentum. By the end of 2020, the business was picking up market share, a first in ten years.

The firm’s leap into data and analytics set it on a course of transformation—the business went on to create cross-functional teams across all major steps in the value chain. In 2021, it launched teams for buy online, pick up in store; price and promo; and digital experience and started a new subscription business and a new marketplace business.

Many fashion and luxury companies have harnessed the power of data to build stronger relationships with their customers and drive sales (see sidebar “How a North American fast-fashion firm turned to data in a crisis”). They have also achieved operational efficiencies that have increased margins. But building data capability is only half of the equation. A data-transformation strategy and road map can put it into practice and set companies on a path to unlocking value. Fashion and luxury companies seeking to extract value from data can implement a sustained campaign in four phases:

• A North Star definition phase, headed up by the CDO, to define the vision, priority domains, and key battlegrounds across the value chain. During this phase, the company creates the data strategy, establishes the data team, selects data-architecture tools, and identifies pilot use cases for high-impact, quick-win opportunities in priority domains. This phase typically lasts six to ten weeks.
• The value-creation phase, where the company starts generating value through two or three quick-win use cases. In this phase, the company also migrates data to the new architecture, sets up data governance, and launches training and change-management programs. This phase lasts four to six months.
• Scale, where the transformation is scaled to tens of use cases in parallel, in three- to four-month development cycles, with many rounds of two-week sprints. In this phase, it is critical to tackle the topic of data culture, which is typically the most formidable barrier to scaling digital and analytics transformations. In fact, 33 percent of executives cited culture as the top challenge  in meeting their digital and analytics priorities. This phase lasts six to nine months.
• The final phase of data and analytics transformation, when data and analytics are fully embedded within the company value-creation machine. By now, the company will have data capabilities spread across the organization and will have hundreds of use cases in production that deliver value.

The initial leap into data should not be daunting for fashion and luxury companies; many have proven the investment worthwhile. What’s more, investment in data and analytics could pay for itself—the upfront cash investment can be scaled as value is created. The sooner fashion and luxury companies leap in, the better. And help is at hand—a strategic approach can structure an effective data-transformation program, build momentum through realizing quick wins, and create long-term value.

Sandrine Devillard is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Montreal office, Holger Harreis is a senior partner in the Düsseldorf office, Nicholas Landry is an associate partner in the Vancouver office, and Carlos Sanchez Altable is an associate partner in the Madrid office.

The authors wish to thank Anita Balchandani, Achim Berg, Antonio Gonzalo, Carly Donovan, Davide Grande, Kayvaun Rowshankish, Kate Smaje, and Asin Tavakoli for their contributions to this article.

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New CAS Class Teaches the History of Empires Through Fashion and Beauty

Students design and construct custom outfits based on historical case studies.

Jilene Chua’s Fashion and Beauty Under War and Empire is a course on how clothing and makeup provided insights into war and empire in the 20th century.

Sam Thomas (COM’24)

Jackie ricciardi.

A skirt made of newspaper. A blonde wig with brown roots. A headband made of crocheted “plarn” (yarn made of repurposed plastic bags). A pair of army green pants with extra pockets sewn around the ankles.

In lieu of a traditional exam, Jilene Chua , a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of history, assigned her students a different kind of final for their Fashion and Beauty Under War and Empire class: designing and constructing an entire outfit. The course, which wrapped earlier this month, spans the time periods from settler colonialism in the 1800s to the modern day and sets out to examine how clothing and makeup can provide insights into war and empire in the 20th century.

During the final two meetings of the class, groups presented their creations, accompanied by historical case studies they wrote reflecting on the symbolism of each piece. While some students had sewing experience, others were crafting outfits for the first time.

Chua, who came to BU this year, says she designed the Fashion and Beauty Under War and Empire class as a way to unite her research interests of history, fashion, and empire. “I wanted to figure out a way to have students learn about [this history], but in a way that wasn’t just constant violence,” she says. “Sometimes, histories of empires can be really dark and involve a lot of brutal things, so I wanted the students to think about how unexpected things like clothing, fashion, and beauty can be ways of analyzing this form of power.”

Sometimes, histories of empires can be really dark and involve a lot of brutal things, so I wanted the students to think about how unexpected things like clothing, fashion, and beauty can be ways of analyzing this form of power. Jilene Chua

Chua says the students in the class—which attracted different majors and class years—made connections she hadn’t even considered. For example, one class discussion on the prevalence of camouflage in fashion turned into an analysis of military recruitment—specifically, how it affected students during their high school experience.

In a presentation titled “Sustainability & Empire Through Time,” students investigated how different populations utilized resources readily available around them for clothing. For example, one student created a crocheted wrap to reflect how some Native American tribes used the fur of Churro sheep for clothing since it was a by-product of a food source. Another student made a shirt and attached a Kirkland jasmine rice bag, representing how people repurposed food sacks during the Great Depression.

In another presentation, titled “Combat Couture: The American Culture of War,” students examined how fashion in the United States is based on a military aesthetic. They discussed the Bikini Atoll , a coral reef in the Pacific Ocean that the US government used as a nuclear testing site and how it displaced and harmed its inhabitants. The bikini swimsuit was introduced and named just four days after the testing. Now, when someone says “bikini,” it conjures images of summer days and swimming rather than nuclear waste. 

“It started to make me think about how I didn’t have that on my syllabus, so I changed it to adapt,” Chua said. “It made sense to add because they have all these experiences with militarism in their own lives that they’re bringing in.” 

During the presentation, one student displayed a fuzzy green jacket with a camo pattern with “Are you registered for the draft?” and only a “Yes” checkbox, painted on the back. This, the student explained, was meant to represent how the draft was not optional, as well as how “fashion can reframe ugly parts of an empire into something soft and fuzzy.”

Reflecting on the course, Kal Hawley (CAS’27) says they were excited to create outfits with the added historical context from the course. Their outfit included a blazer with sewn lace hanging from about waist level, a commentary on softness—that is, not being afraid of being vulnerable or perceived as weak.

Among other topics in the course are the commodification of human products such as hair, skincare during chemical warfare, and profit as a connection between war and beauty. 

Throughout the semester, Chua encouraged students to engage in sustainable practices. The class went together to Goodwill to pick out raw materials and clothing items and they discussed the environmental impacts of the fashion industry—for example, 87 percent of garments made each year end up in a landfill. The material they thrifted or recycled was then used to construct their final outfits.

Students were able to use BU’s Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC), right on the Charles River Campus, when crafting their clothes. EPIC spans 15,000 square feet and offers students access to a variety of engineering and manufacturing tools, such as laser cutters, welding equipment, drill presses, sewing machines, and more. 

Ivan Perez (CAS’24) had no experience making clothes and had no background in fashion before enrolling. He says he took the class as a creative outlet and because he wanted “to see how and what a class like this could offer.” His enrollment in the course was a “happy accident,” he says.

“Aside, of course, from the material covered throughout the semester, the class really helped me express myself creatively through an unfamiliar yet incredibly cool medium,” Perez says. “It certainly was a unique experience, and an obscure class that made the semester very memorable. It is something quite niche that BU offers. I was just fortunate enough to stumble upon a new diamond in the rough.”

Although the class focuses specifically on fashion and beauty, Chua says she hopes this kind of critical societal analysis carries over to other parts of her students’ lives.

“I think they’re already starting to make connections to how this is a culture of militarism all around us even today,” she says. “But with these big topics like war and empire, students can see how they also appear in everyday life, not just through clothing and beauty. We are still living this culture out, right now.”

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Working Paper 24-04: Measuring Price Effects from Disasters Using Public Data: A Case Study of Hurricane Ian

​Justin C. Contat, William M. Doerner, Robert N. Renner, and Malcolm J. Rogers

​​Ab​stract:

Natural disasters can disrupt housing markets, causing destruction to communities and distress to economic activity. To estimate the effects of disasters on home prices, publicly-available data on property damages are often used to classify “treated” properties. However, by design these data lack precise geospatial information, leading to measurement error in the treatment variable as aggregate measures must be used. We leverage leading difference-in-differences and synthetic control methodologies across various treatments and levels of geography to measure price effects with such data following Hurricane Ian’s unexpected landfall in southwest Florida during September 2022, coinciding with the state’s initial recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Empirical results suggest positive, time-varying price effects, though we place caveats on these results as there may be many mechanisms underway; our results should be interpreted as descriptive correlations and not causal effects for various reasons. Our main contribution is methodological, highlighting the importance of robustness checks, functional form, statistical techniques, and testing across different samples. Additionally, quicker access to high quality public data could enhance quantitatively-informed conversations on natural disaster effects.​

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Implementation framework for PLM: a case study in the fashion industry

• ORIGINAL ARTICLE
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• Published: 25 January 2021
• Volume 113 , pages 435–448, ( 2021 )

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• Virginia Fani 1 ,
• Chiara Falchi 1 ,
• Bianca Bindi 1 &
• Romeo Bandinelli   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5547-4225 1  

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The implementation of a PLM is a great process of change, representing a critical phase due to the inertia that characterizes some organizations. This evidence especially occurs in industry new to PLM, such as the fashion one, where a lack of clear guidelines for implementation significantly increases the risk of failure of that process. In addition, an adequate project management approach that actively includes final users during the whole process will avoid the mismatch between outcomes and requirements. To support an efficient and effective introduction of PLM, it is then important to define a structured implementation method that involves all interested users from the early stages. A literature review has been conducted as preliminary step to investigate if bottom-up approaches to PLM implementation in fashion industry have already been studied. Based on the evidences from literature review, a framework was therefore defined, detailing the step-by-step procedure to follow for effectively implement a PLM considering the peculiarities of the fashion industry. To give evidence of the applicability of the proposed framework, it has been successfully used during the implementation process of a PLM software in a real context. The Italian company involved in the case study, Graziella, belongs to the gold-working district of Arezzo, in Tuscany, and has been working for more than 60 years in the gold jewellery sector.

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1 Introduction

The acronym PLM (product lifecycle management) has a wide meaning, being considered business model based on a strategic approach to managing processes, information and resources to support a dynamic configuration of the product lifecycle. PLM was born in the 80s in the aerospace and automotive sectors, but it has recently become important also in other industries, such as the fashion one.

The fashion industry is currently worth around $300 billion, which is expected to rise to over $360 billion by 2025. Footnote 1 In this context, Italy stands out with 24 of the 100 largest fashion and luxury companies operating worldwide. Footnote 2 The fashion sector is a dynamic reality that has witnessed radical transformations in recent years. First, the lifecycle of products is getting shorter and shorter because customers require new products faster than ever. Second, fashion companies have to manage a very large number of stock keeping units (SKUs), due to the combinatorial explosion of variants. Finally, supply chain networks show a higher complexity because companies have started to outsource non-core activities in a global scenario. The trade-off between the characteristics listed above and the mandatory outstanding quality level to be guaranteed on the market justifies the growing interest of this sector for PLM. This tool allows companies to create and update a unique archive that contains all the information related to the products, avoiding the proliferation of data. It facilitates collaboration and real-time sharing of updated information along the entire supply chain. Thanks to PLM, it is also possible to make internal processes more efficient, eliminating activities without added value. Although the benefits of PLM are clear, it is a process of change that is not always easy to implement, being often time-consuming and leading to inefficiencies if not well-managed.

To understand how these issues could be approached, a literature review on Scopus database has been conducted to frame the topic. The used keywords were “PLM” or “Product Lifecycle Management” associated with the term “Fashion” or others that refer to the main product categories that characterize the fashion sector (i.e. “Apparel”, “Garment”, “Gold-working”, “Footwear”, “Jewellery”, “Leather”, “Textile”). This research results in 143 papers, but 88 of them have been excluded according to the following criteria: (i) publication date of 2000 or later; and (ii) title and/or abstract focused on the reviewed topic.

Only 6 of the remaining 55 papers have dealt with PLM implementation in the fashion industry, but a single reference for a detailed and structured application framework, covering all the phases from the initial ones to the post go live ones, is still missing.

D’Avolio et al. [ 3 ] provide points for reflection for academics and entrepreneurs who are trying to reach a full PLM implementation in their business, aligned to the best practices. D’Avolio et al. [ 4 ] conduct a case study to describe PLM implementation and merge business processes with enabling information technologies. This article, differently from the one proposed, has the limit to investigate only the earlier phase of a PLM implementation. D’Avolio et al. [ 5 ] compare current practices in conducted PLM implementation projects with the PLM implementation guidelines from the literature review, also covering the post-implementation stages. Unlike the present work, this paper reports the guidelines present in the literature, but they do not focus on identifying a step-by-step process that covers the whole project of PLM implementation. D’Avolio et al. [ 6 ] propose a framework for effective implementation of PLM in the fashion industry based on four consecutive phases: identification of business issues and needs, model process and data, identification of PLM business objects and a scenario analysis to select a PLM solution, without describing the detailed implementation and tests needed before go-live. Li and Qi [ 11 ] present an Agile methodology but it focuses only on the implementation step. Vezzetti et al. [ 20 ] propose a PLM implementation framework in the textile industry but it does not provide clear guidelines from a managerial point of view.

According to this overview, in the following paragraphs, an implementation framework is proposed and applied in a real context.

The paper is structured as follows: in the first section, the proposed PLM implementation framework is presented and described in detail in all its phases; the second section presents the main evidence from the case study; finally, the main conclusions and further developments are listed in the last section.

2 Methodology

The proposed framework aims to identify a PLM implementation roadmap in order to make the application steps of this software more effective within companies. The starting point has been the model proposed by Vezzetti et al. [ 20 ], improved to overcome its limitations.

To support an efficient introduction of a software, it is important to define a structured implementation method that involves all interested users from the early stages. According to this, a focus has been made on mapping the needs of key users involved in the lifecycle management of products, confirming the attention paid on using a bottom-up strategy [ 1 , 15 ]. Beside this, the proposed framework has been developed to include clear, quantitative and objective guidelines for PLM implementations in real scenarios, due to the evidence that a rigorous procedure to follow increases the successfulness of these processes [ 2 ] Moreover, details to the most effective project management approach to be used during the implementation process are given to define how to gain the expected results with the less unneeded efforts.

The 4-steps implementation methodology proposed in the present work is shown in Fig.  1 .

Proposed implementation framework

From a project management perspective, compared to the sequential model developed by Vezzetti et al. [ 20 ], Fig. 1 shows the proposed hybrid Waterfall-Agile implementation framework. The hybrid approach has been chosen to gain benefits from both of them, as widely confirmed by the literature [ 10 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. On the one hand, the 4 steps are sequential each other, following a Waterfall approach to guarantee a structured planning of the main phases of the project. On the other hand, the implementation step (i.e. “Detailed implementation” in Fig. 1 ) follows an Agile approach, providing micro-releases to be tested by key users after each time-boxed sprint. This approach, as confirmed in literature for deployment activities, ensures frequent feedback from the final users to avoid mismatches between users’ requirements and functions released at the end of the project.

Going deeper in details, the first phase of the proposed model concerns the analysis of the processes (i.e. “Processes analysis” in Fig. 1 ). For implementation in fashion supply chains, the macro-processes involved are the ones identified by Fani et al. [ 7 ] for that industry: (i) design, (ii) prototyping, sampling and engineering, (iii) sourcing, (iv) production and (v) ordering and retail. Each one of them has to be splitted in activities, mapped with the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. It is a well-known graphic modelling inspired by flowcharts, often chosen for being easy to understand even by operating staff. To map the process, it is then necessary to consult the involved key users. Semi-structured interviews are used as efficient method to collect data to fully understand company realities through a bottom-up approach [ 12 ]. Each activity reported in the BPMN mapping has to be linked to the identified macro-processes, in order to focus the implementation of the only PLM functionalities connected to them. After a second round of interviews, the needs related to each activity described in the mapping are identified to highlight the main issues key users have to face with.

Starting from the list of user needs, the second implementation phase begins (i.e. “Needs analysis” in Fig. 1 ). During this phase, the analysis is focused on identifying which are the main PLM functionalities that meet the customers’ needs, solving the related issues. In analogy to Vezzetti et al. [ 20 ], the tool used to identify that match is the relationship matrix of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) approach. In addition, for implementation in fashion supply chains, the proposed model includes the PLM functionalities focused on that industry identified through a detailed literature review by Fani et al. [ 7 ]. First, during the second round of semi-structured interviews, key users were asked to declare an importance score ( d i ) to each need on a Likert scale from 1 to 5, where 1 indicates the lowest degree of importance and 5 the highest. The relative importance ( \( {d}_i^{\prime } \) ) is then calculated as follows:

For the compilation of the relationship matrix, semi-structured interviews with vendors are planned, aimed at understanding which PLM functionalities are able to satisfy each specific users’ need and to what extent. If there is correlation, it is quantified using a scale of three values: 1, 3 and 9. The value 1 is used if the correlation is weak, 3 if it is medium and 9 if the correlation is strong. The matrix of relations is then filled with numerical values, indicated with r ij in Fig.  2 .

QFD relation matrix

In order to obtain a ranking of the PLM functionalities, in analogy to Vezzetti et al. [ 20 ], the independent scoring method (ISM) is used. The absolute importance of each PLM functionality, indicated with w j , is calculated as the sum of the relative importance of each user need ( d i ′) multiplied by the value that identifies how much a j-th functionality satisfies each specific request (r ij ):

The relative importance of each functionality is therefore calculated as follows:

The ranking of the PLM functionalities is obtained sorting them in descending order of relative importance.

Compared to Vezzetti et al. [ 20 ], the “Guidelines formalization” phase was replaced by two phases (i.e. “Detailed implementation” and “Final test and training” in Fig. 1 ). This choice is linked to the fact that, compared to Vezzetti et al. [ 20 ], the present work aims to go beyond the definition of a list of PLM functionalities to be implemented. In particular, a more detailed description of the phases that follow the analysis of processes and needs is included in the present work, covering the approaches to be adopted from the implementation to the autonomous use of the solution by final users.

Looking at the “Detailed implementation” phase, as mentioned before, an Agile approach is followed to effectively guarantee the results of the project. The ranking of PLM functionalities coming from the previous phase represents the input of this step. Depending on the specific use-case, some of those functionalities could be developed immediately while others postponed to next project waves that follow the go-live of the first one. According to the Agile approach, the deployments related to the project first wave are splitted on time-fixed sprints, usually covering the range of 1 to 4 weeks [ 19 ]. Based on literature evidences [ 9 , 18 ], each sprint consists of the three phases shown in Fig. 1 :

“Detailed design”, which provides the definition, review and validation of the deployments to be included in the sprint final release.

“Implementation”, in which functions included in the sprint are released by developers first in the development environment and, after their approval, in the test environment.

“Unit test”, in which key users verify the functions released in the test environment, giving feedback for possible changes and improvements. This phase ends with the release of a micro-output in the production environment.

In the final step (i.e. “Final test and training” in Fig. 1 ), key users conduct an integration and system test. This step is useful to verify that the PLM software works as expected [ 13 ], and no problems occur in the interaction between the individual micro-outputs that have been independently developed during each sprint. After the previous tests, a training phase is scheduled, during which all users are trained on the use of the software. The relevance of this step is related to the fact that one of the main causes of failure during software implementation is the lack of adequate user training [ 8 , 14 ]. The output of this phase is the go-live, representing the moment when the software tested only by key users is made available to all the interested users. Finally, it will be necessary to provide a post-go-live phase, during which the software house supports final users to solve problems that could arise immediately after the adoption of the new tool.

To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework, it has been concretely used within Graziella company during the whole PLM implementation process. This single-case study does not have the purpose to validate the framework but to give evidence about its usability in a real scenario.

Graziella Group S.p.a. is an Italian fashion company founded in 1958 by Graziella Buoncompagni, the current Honorary President, who began to create handcrafted gold jewellery characterized by a personal and innovative style at a very young age. From the past small laboratory in the province of Arezzo (Tuscany) to the new headquarter inaugurated in 2000, Graziella has become an international leader in the world of fashion and luxury made in Italy.

As “step zero” for the application of the proposed framework, the macro-processes to be included in the PLM implementation project have been identified during the kick-off meeting, choosing among the ones identified by Fani et al. [ 7 ]. More in details, the macro-processes of design, prototyping, sampling and engineering, sourcing and ordering and retail have been taken into consideration.

According to the “Process analysis” step, the BPMN mapping standard has been used to highlight activities, resources and documentation involved during the selected macro-processes. The result is shown in Fig.  3 .

BPMN mapping for Graziella company

Each activity identified in the BPMN mapping has been reconducted to one of the macro-processes identified in the previous step, as shown in Table 1 .

At this point, semi-structured interviews to the key users identified during the kick-off meeting have been realized to understand the main needs connected to each mapped activity (i.e. Table 5 in Appendix).

The output of the first step is the list of the users’ needs that will be the input for the second step. Key users’ needs have been grouped into 10 macro-categories, as shown in Table 2 .

Looking more in details at the listed general needs, one of the users’ needs for the first mapped activity (i.e. “Market analysis”) is having tools to support market analysis. In particular, users need support to the development and consultation of new market trends. Furthermore, it is important to analyze sales of previous seasons for the various reference markets in order to understand if the results were consistent with expectations and, consequently, if they are replicable for the current season.

The “Market analysis” activity in the current AS IS configuration is based on the compilation of an Excel sheet containing information related to the target market (e.g. competitors, main products, price range). Photos and inspirations are collected during business travels to understand the potential buyers’ preferences. However, these data are not currently stored in a structured way, making having a single interface a primary need: in this way, these data could be easily consulted by final users. The same need has been also highlighted for storing files related to the raw prototypes obtained from 3D scans and reworked by suitable graphics software. Similarly, it is also requested for photos and data related to samples and final products used for the catalogue.

During the interview, another need highlighted by the key users has been that a timed flow of activities with clear deadlines has never been established. This is one of the main reasons of inefficiency during the order collection phase, which represents the first contact between company and customers during fairs. For example, catalogues with photos associated with specific barcodes are often not ready, making sales agents unable to collect orders in a structured way. It often happens that samples to be shown to customers do not match the initial requirements, because to meet the fair date, there was no time to effectively carry out the activities needed and non-compliance with the specifications emerged. According to this, defining project timelines allows a greater awareness of all the actors on meeting deadlines. For instance, due dates must be defined for both the validation of raw prototypes and sharing the Preliminary and Technical Sheets. In addition to a punctual definition of deadlines, a need to insert blocks to the process flow has emerged. In particular, the activity related to the “Industrial code creation” can only take place once raw prototypes have been validated by the Creative department, to avoid the creation of unnecessary industrial codes for not-approved products. Another block must be inserted before the validation of samples, so that the subsequent “BOM Creation” activity will be done only once the sample has been approved.

At various points along the product development process, the need to digitize product data emerges. The Creative Box Sheet is a simple Word file where information relating to the products are entered (e.g. line, creative theme, basic technology), as well as the Preliminary Sheet, an evolution of the previous one that includes the industrial code of the finished product. The Technical Sheet for each product is also a Word file where the Catalogue department manually enters information such as the required semi-finished products, main suppliers and price range. The digitization of these parameters makes the process more efficient and less error prone. In general, all the information contained in the current information systems must therefore be digitized, such as those relating to the BOMs and the finishing packages.

Several actors throughout the development process make changes and updates to the various documents. All interested users must have access to the updated versions of them to avoid errors that arise from the use of incorrect information relating to the products. Examples of documents to be consulted are the following:

The Creative Box Sheet

The Preliminary Sheet

The Technical Sheet

Documents related to raw prototypes

BOM updates emerged during the product development and realization or following changes requested during the order collection phase (e.g. information related to the product weights, updates of the price range, changes of product finishes due to customer requests).

Everyone has a specific responsibility within the product development flow, so a need that has emerged is to give specific privileges to specific user groups. For instance, only the staff of the product development office can fill in and edit the Creative Box Sheet, while the staff of the Catalogue department is the only one who can fill in and modify the Preliminary and Technical Sheets. Finally, the BOM can be created and edited only by the Production staff and the Catalogue department.

Product development is a process that involves cross-functional teams and the timely communication about the realization of raw versions of products and their evolutions among the various actors is a necessity that emerges along the process. The most important information to be shared for the Graziella company is related to the following:

The creation of the Creative Box Sheet

The validation of raw prototypes and samples

The creation of industrial codes for finished product and semi-finished product

The massive generation of barcodes

The BOM updates in the pre- and post-order collection phase.

Parallelly with the implementation of the PLM, the company is carrying out a software selection to evaluate the introduction of cataloguing and order collection tools. The integration with these tools is therefore required, as well as with the graphics software already used in the prototyping phase (e.g. CAD, ZBrush, Matrix and Adobe Photoshop).

Some procedures currently managed on the company’s information systems must be automated to both reduce time-consuming activities and data entry errors. The guided creation of industrial codes and barcodes according to the product master characteristics (e.g. product line, mood) and the relative finishes are particularly important. The guided association of finishes to collections and finished products must also be reproduced.

An automatic price updating procedure will have to be introduced according to the weight variation. When the final price is defined, the estimated cost for the finished product is calculated. In the current configuration, this evaluation is based on the raw materials and not on the industrial costs. For gold jewellery, in fact, the cost has been always calculated according to the specific weight and title, also because the cost of the manufacturing process is almost irrelevant, but on silver items, it has a significant impact. According to this, the need that emerges is therefore to evaluate the final cost not only based on raw materials but also on the type of processing.

In the second step of the proposed methodology, structured interviews to users allow to establish an absolute importance score for each need identified in the previous step. This score is established using the Likert scale ( d i ) and then the relative importance score ( \( {d}_i^{\prime } \) ) is calculated. The results are shown in Table 6 in Appendix.

In addition to users’ needs, the 27 PLM functionalities identified by Fani et al. [ 7 ] are also considered as input. The purpose of the “Needs analysis” step, in fact, is to identify a priority ranking of functionalities to be implemented in the company. As anticipated, two tools are used during this phase: the QFD relationship matrix and the ISM. The relationship matrix is filled according to structured interviews addressed to the software house that has been chosen for the implementation.

For instance, Fig.  4 shows the answers for the activity of the BPMN mapping related to the realization and validation of raw prototypes. On rows, the user needs declared for the analysed activity are listed, while columns show the PLM functionalities identified by Fani et al. [ 7 ]. Looking at the first row in Fig. 4 , it refers to the emerging need in the prototyping phase related to the integration of PLM with graphics software, getting 2% as relative importance score ( \( {d}_i^{\prime } \) ) in the previous step. Moving to the results coming from this step, the involved software house declares that this need is completely satisfied by the integration software functionality, assigning a score of 9. On the other hand, also the product data management (PDM) and BOM management functionalities are involved, with an assigned score of 3. The evidence is that files and data extracted from the graphics software must be imported on the PLM, but also archived and linked to the BOMs, respectively. Finally, as shown in the following table, not all crossings are populated because not all the PLM functionalities on columns meet the needs on rows.

Example of filled QFD relationship matrix

Using the ISM, a ranking of the most appropriate PLM functionalities to meet the needs of the interviewed users was obtained, as shown in Table 3 .

The most relevant functionalities resulting from the ranking (i.e. see Table 4 ) have been included in the first deployments, while others have been postponed to future project waves.

More in details, the five features having an importance scores lower than 2% in Table 4 and the workflow and calendar management functionalities have been excluded from the first project wave.. This choice has been done to reduce the overall deployment time, as these features can be postponed to a second project wave without impacting what was foreseen in the first wave. In addition, the cataloguing and order collection software are currently under selection. Finally, the features with an importance score of 0 will not be implemented at all.

For the Graziella case study, the features identified in the first wave have been divided into 10 sprints (i.e. see Table 3 ), according to the Agile approach used in the “Detailed implementation” phase. The work to be done in each sprint has been planned in meetings called “Pre-sprint planning meetings” that take place at the beginning of each iteration. The input of each sprint is, in fact, a direct consequence of the micro-output of the previous one and the feedback collected by the key users.

Each sprint has been a duration of 4 weeks, including 2 weeks for the “Detail design”, a week for the “Implementation” and a week for the “Unit test”. Each “Unit test” ended with the release in production of what has passed the test, while the rest have been rescheduled in the next sprint.

The first sprint concerns the definition of the hierarchical structure and the relative master data. More in details, this sprint aimed at defining attributes, variations by season, markets, collections, themes and product categories, representing the basis for all the other sprints, and for this reason, it has been done first.

The second sprint (i.e. “Colour Management and relative Master Data”) is directly linked to the Colour Management PLM function: in this phase, adherence to standards for the definition of colour and coding rules is established.

The third sprint (i.e. “Material Management and relative Master Data”) is linked to the Material Management PLM functionality. The previous Colour Management functionality is preparatory to this module as the rules for associating colours with materials are defined at this stage.

The fourth sprint (i.e. “Article Management and relative Master Data”) is linked to the functions of Colour and Material Management: in this phase, the rules for associating colours and materials to the articles are established. It is also connected to BOM Management because in this phase, the article code is established, representing the starting point for the development and the detailed description of the BOM.

The fifth sprint (i.e. “BOM Management”) establishes the information that must be contained in the BOMs along the different phases of the product lifecycle, from prototyping, to sampling, to production. The functions of Colour Management and Material Management are preparatory to this phase since relevant information to be included in a BOM refers to the colours and materials associated with the article.

The sixth sprint (i.e. “Line & Range Planning”) allows to implement procedures for a structured planning and a correct definition of the mix of products per market.

In the seventh sprint (i.e. “Cost sheet”), rules that allow users to define a preventive cost from the first stages of product development are established. That cost will then be updated by proceeding in development, up to the definitive one. The definition of the cost is directly linked to aspects such as materials, colours and BOMs: for this reason, the functions of Colour Management, Material Management and BOM Management are preparatory.

The eighth sprint (i.e. “Documentation”) is used to manage all documents within the PLM. It is directly linked to the realization of the line and range planning, which include documents such as the collection form (i.e. the “Creative Box Sheet” for the Graziella company), as well as the Technical Sheet Management functionality. It is also linked to the Collaborative Tool and PDM functions, as it is at this stage that documents containing updated product data can be organized in a single shared space available to all interested users. Furthermore, the possibility of associating with each document different states that identify its level of maturity (i.e. creation, validation or obsolescence) allowed by the PDM functionality is guaranteed.

The ninth sprint (i.e. “Definition of user profiles and allowed actions”) is directly linked to the PDM functionality. In this phase, specific privileges are established for groups of users, determining the allowed actions which can be read only, write, modify and delete information within the sections of the PLM and related documents.

The tenth sprint (i.e. “PLM-AS400 Integration”) plans to structure the data import/export procedures between AS400 and the PLM (e.g. import from AS400 to the PLM of customer and supplier master data; export from the PLM to AS400 of articles, materials, colours master data).

4 Conclusion and future developments

From an academic point of view, this work led to the definition of a structured methodology for implementing a PLM software in the fashion industry that bridged the gap existing in the literature.

To do this, the method proposed by Vezzetti et al. in [ 20 ] has been expanded and improved in some of its points. The macro-processes and functionalities focused on the fashion industry identified by Fani et al. [ 7 ] are respectively introduced as input in the “Process analysis” and “Needs analysis” phases, to ensure the definition of guidelines dedicated to that sector. The main advantage gainable with this industry-oriented approach is to drastically reduce the probability of failure of software implementations that include standard functionalities despite dedicated ones. Standardization, in fact, could result in a misalignment with the peculiarities of the sector, increasing the risk of failure to meet the specific requirements of the final users.

Instead IDEF0 (ICAM DEFinition for Function Modelling), BPMN is used as mapping standard because it is more suitable for the representation of business processes that must be computerized.

The “Detailed implementation” and the “Final test and training” steps, only marginally described in the single item “Guideline formalization” proposed by Vezzetti et al. [ 20 ], are extensively detailed to be effectively used in concrete scenarios. Unclear guidelines, in fact, introduce subjectivity in key activities such as the selection of the PLM functionalities to implement and their priority that could lengthen project time. For instance, errors in the identification of the PLM functionalities, ranked by priority, that really meet the users’ requirements result in unnecessary developments and extra-efforts needed to manage ongoing change requests.

To reinforce those results, the most appropriate project management method for the different phases was detailed, according to the well-known evidence that it is useful to adopt a hybrid Waterfall-Agile implementation model to get the benefits of both. As shown in Fig. 1 , in fact, the first two steps and the last one will follow a Waterfall approach, while the central part of the project is carried out with an Agile approach, which provides micro-releases in production environment of functionalities tested and shared with customers. This overcomes the main limit of a pure Waterfall approach, allowing the collection of feedback from final users after each time-boxed sprint instead of when the whole implementation is completed.

The methodology was conceived as a guideline in a concrete context, assuming value also from a managerial point of view. The applicability of this model was confirmed by the case study of the Graziella company, which successfully implemented a PLM system using this methodology. Figures and tables in the sections “ Results ” and “ Appendices ”, in fact, resume the step-by-step results obtained from the application of the proposed framework. This single-case study does not have the purpose to validate the framework but to give evidence about its usability in a real scenario. To reinforce the added value, future developments plan to widen the analyzed sample by involving other companies in the fashion sector.

Further researches could also include the application of the proposed framework to other industries in which PLM is emerging, such as the food one. The implementation on other sectors requires the identification of the macro-processes and PLM functionalities specific for those industries through a detailed literature review. Once they have been defined, the procedure to follow for an effective PLM implementation is the one described in the present paper. New companies involved as case studies, belonging to the fashion industry or not, will then require interviews to new key users. They could result in different BPMN-mapped activities and both detailed and general key users’ needs, as well as different scores in the QFD relationship matrix and project sprints for the ranked PLM functionalities.

Finally, new studies could envisage the extension of the implementation methodology to other software, such as the ones related to the quality control and the warehouse management, as well as management software.

Data availability

The paper has no associated data.

Kantar, “Fashion Innovation Week”, Lugano, April 2019

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Abbreviations

Business intelligence

Bill of Material

Business Process Model and Notation

Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing

ICAM DEFinition for Function Modelling

Independent Scoring Method

Product data management

Product lifecycle management

Quality function deployment

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Acknowledgments

The case study included in this work has been carried out within the Graziella company. The authors would like to thank Elena Ghezzi, Marco Marchini and Augusto Tocca for actively participating to all the phases of the project and their precious support in the validation of the implementation framework.

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V.F. designed and performed the framework, derived the models and analyzed the data, with the support of R.B. C.F. and B.B. helped carry out the test case. V.F. and C.F. wrote the manuscript in consultation with R.B.

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Fani, V., Falchi, C., Bindi, B. et al. Implementation framework for PLM: a case study in the fashion industry. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 113 , 435–448 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-021-06623-4

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-021-06623-4

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