Felipe Caro and Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz
(This blog is based on the article "Fast Fashion: Business Model Overview and Research Opportunities" to appear in Retail Supply Chain Management: Quantitative Models and Empirical Studies, 2nd Edition, Springer, New York, NY.)
Fueled by its success, the term fast fashion has become ubiquitous and it has been used indiscriminately to describe almost any specialty apparel retailer with prices below a certain threshold, spanning stores like Old Navy and Chico's that have almost nothing in common besides the fact that they sell clothes. Hence, it is worth asking: which retailers are fast fashion and which are not?
The Wikipedia entry for fast fashion lists 22 firms (all links accessed August 26, 2013). The list is quite diverse, but most of the firms have the following in common. First, they are specialty apparel retailers with brick & mortar stores and some online presence. Second, they are not "haute couture" or trend-setters but rather fashion followers that target the mid-to-low price range for ages 3-40. To elaborate a more definite list of firms, we performed a frequency count using the Factiva database. We first searched for all the media publications in the last two years that contained the exact phrase "fast fashion" and we looked for brand names to form a preliminary list. Then, for each brand, we counted in how many of these media publications the brand was mentioned. A ranking of the brands that appeared in at least 20 publications is shown in the table below and using these numbers we created a word-cloud. As a form of validation, we performed the same frequency count using all the PDF documents available through Google that contained the exact phrase "fast fashion". The corresponding ranking using the latter is also reported in the table.
From the table and the word-cloud it is clear that most online sources associate fast fashion with two retailers: H&M and Zara. Hennes and Mauritz (H&M), based in Sweden, is a rather secretive company but its annual report describes the business concept as "fashion and quality at the best price". On the other hand, Zara -- based in Spain and part of the Inditex holding -- has been repeatedly studied and its mode of operation has been widely documented, see Caro (2012). Both Zara and H&M to a similar extent have undertaken a radical change to the design cycle so as to provide fashion almost on demand. Specifically, these retailers have chosen to work at the item level, rather than using collections. They can do this because they do not have a wholesale channel that is demanding a full collection, and they control the retail point of sales. Such control structure allows them to avoid batching thousands of products together. In particular, it is no longer needed to design together products with quick and slow supplier lead times.
It's somewhat surprising that the third and fourth positions in the list are Gap and Uniqlo since their assortments are mostly composed of basics. Hence, these firms don't qualify as fast fashion, but they are usually mentioned in articles as competitors to fast-fashion retailers or as examples of the opposite retail business model based on long production cycles. The two retailers that follow in the list – TopShop and Forever 21 – are more representative of fast fashion given their offerings. Both are privately own and have been making big strides in the marketplace. As for the remaining retailers in the list, their association with fast fashion is limited. It will be interesting to see how the list evolves and whether any major online player emerges since currently they are conspicuously absent.
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