Managing The Fashion Business
Companies in the fashion and modelling industry have to deal with global sourcing problems and they need to regularly evaluate their material sourcing strategies. Labour charges and transportation costs are the factors that often determine where production has to take place. The production takes place often across multiple places; sometimes the factory would be located in different states or countries, or even continents. Setting up of subcontracting agreements and material transportation, in addition to the synchronization with raw material supply, cutting and sewing, is a long and tedious process.
While working one’s way through the many pre-production stages and steps, one would see that it usually takes a long time to introduce a new fashion product in the modelling market. The complex and complicated nature of the supply chain and the global production styles and methods add to the industry’s long lead times. This includes yarn and fabric selection, garment development, specification notes and the sampling methods followed in the industry. This particular and unique arrangement of extended or very long lead times does not correlate with the necessity or need to react immediately to subtle changes in customer demands or requirements.
The ever shifting seasonal trends and this trend-driven nature of fashion and modelling industry show that the product life cycles are really very short. Even in the case of cyclic demands where the life cycle may continue to go round further, there are at times small changes to the apparel’s design; and, the colour or size combinations might go in for remarkable changes. The logistics aspects and the difficulty in managing the large number of styles along with the necessity to maintain enough stock keeping units is a practice that has to be given due consideration.
In this kind of a situation, fashion and modelling companies must manage an optimum product mix. Besides being burdened with long lead times, fashion producers are pressurised to design and develop new product lines constantly in an effort to maintain and retain the retailers’ interest and to increase the product sales. Producers have been convinced that in order to maintain maximum speed, flexibility and alertness to satisfy ever-changing customer demands, which is more frequent than ever before, has become a sort of challenge for them. They have to judge the people’s needs and have to come out with such types of fashion accessories and products. Gone are the good old days when a perfect and straight forward fashion trend direction determined what the general consumers wore. Nowadays, many new styles are available, and with a greater rise in globalization aspects, consumers can get to know about the latest fashion news through some of the latest media tools as well.
Fashion products undergo changes very frequently starting from hosiery items and basic underwear stuffs through medium priced high street products, to some of the exclusive high end fashion brands. Managing the brand values and awareness along with brand loyalty is a serious marketing task and helps in retaining the brand position in the fashion and modelling industry.