This chapter indicates the perspectives on retailing and Supply Chain Management (SCM); trends and issues with fast fashion industry; the overview of Fashion Supply Chain Management (FSCM); fashion retail supply chains and fashion sales forecasting; fashion retail supply chains and sustainability; the overview of New Product Development (NPD); NPD process, social media, and digital environments; NPD, ecological marketing, and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA); NPD performance and supplier-buyer relationship; and the importance of NPD collaboration. In addition to the traditional functions of logistics management in fashion companies, which include inventory management and transportation management, FSCM places a strong emphasis on both collaboration and partnership among various channel members along with the fashion retail supply chains. With the advance of the Internet and social media, NPD strategy provides a beneficial framework for creating the new products and improving the product performance, product cost, and quality of the existing products.
TopIntroduction
In recent decades, the fast fashion industry has been characterized by various operations across both developing and developed countries (Turker & Altuntas, 2014). Fashion retail is recognized as having a strong focus on product-centric innovation and seasonal product development (Sorescu, Frambach, Singh, Rangaswamy, & Bridges, 2011). Fashion retail is the major sector in retailing by number of stores, brand proliferation, and importance for urban atmospheres regarding fashion supply chain management (FSCM) (Sen, 2008). Challenges specific to the fast fashion industry include the massive product variety and the very short product life cycles (Mehrjoo & Pasek, 2014).
New product development (NPD) projects are the important drivers for organizational performance (Lechler & Thomas, 2015). Kettunen et al. (2015) indicated that any NPD project is susceptible to uncertainty concerning the success of its development. This uncertainty relates to the quality of the resulting product and to its commercial success, which is influenced by market conditions (Kettunen et al., 2015). To ensure product quality and consistency, the relevant combination of product and process elements is important (Hayakawa, 2015). A customer-based structure enhances the ability of NPD companies to coordinate the needs of given customer segments based on the new product information from different sources across organizations (Reinartz, Krafft, & Hoyer, 2004).
NPD in the fashion industry covers a wide range of activities, such as market research, trend analysis, merchandising, product design, and product prototyping (Frings, 2008). Because of both technological developments on the Internet and user preferences, customer involvement in NPD is becoming more popular and receives broad attention from both academia and businesses (Weber & Geerts, 2011). In order to expedite the NPD process in the fashion companies, it is necessary to improve the internal processes in a fashion enterprise as well as the connections with external parties (Choy, To, Ning, Lee, & Leung, 2015). The utilization of information and communication technology (ICT) in the NPD effort leads to the market success of a given product when launched (Jespersen & Buck, 2010).
This chapter aims to bridge the gap in the literature on the thorough literature consolidation of FSCM and NPD. The extensive literature of FSCM and NPD provides a contribution to practitioners and researchers by indicating the advanced issues and implications of FSCM and NPD in order to maximize the supply chain impact of FSCM and NPD in the digital age.