Modern Fashion Supply Chain
Without further ado, let’s just discuss it. Because it’s going to be longer than you can imagine!
CHAPTER 1: What Is a Modern Fashion Supply Chain?
The fashion industry is notoriously unpredictable. New capsule collaborations may fly or fail, new product trends can surge suddenly and shifting sands of international trade can quickly shake trusted supplier relationships.
Leading apparel and accessory brands recognize that while product quality must always improve, inventory priorities will change from year to year and even from season to season. Being able to manage product quality, inventory volume and fashion supplier relationships requires the flexibility, coordination and balance of an innovative modern fashion supply chain.
Before we get into how to build one, let’s talk about what constitutes a “modern” fashion supply chain?
The 5 Elements of a Modern Fashion Supply Chain
Fashion companies should strive to build a network of 21st century fashion suppliers, namely:
- Digital
- Various
- Transparent
- predictive
- Partner
1. Digital Fashion Supply Chain Prevents Logistics Headaches
When COVID-19 closed country after country’s physical borders and non-essential businesses, traditional fashion supply chain risks hit the headlines. Most fashion professionals responsible for supplier relations and product quality saw their year tipped over the balance as in-person quality assurance checks and factory audits made it impossible. In addition, the web of supplier-brand communications was already fragmented, and the need for seamless digital-based brand-to-supplier solutions became very clear.
Disruptors like Amazon, Stripe, Shopify, and others have been driving B2C retail innovation for some time. However, comprehensive, intuitive and easy-to-use technology tools have been slow to influence B2B fashion suppliers and sources. The market is rich in tools to get fashion products to customers under any circumstances, but there are few tools to help fashion brands bring those products to manufacturers and deliver them to retailers in any crisis.
Savvy fashion brands and proactive new fashion designers must seek the best digital tools available for B2B sourcing and supply chain management. Doing so not only prepares them to navigate the highs and lows of a major logistics crisis, it also makes for better communication across the sourcing, manufacturing, and shipping of apparel, regardless of location, time zone, or language.
2. Diverse Fashion Supply Chain Reduces Risk
When viewed through a traditional pre-COVID-19 supply chain framework, sourcing clothing and accessories with multiple manufacturing partners can be seen as logistically inconvenient and costly. But in reality, the more modern models of diverse supply chains give fashion brands and designers some notable competitive advantages. Such as getting sampling and production offers from multiple manufacturers helps fashion brands keep procurement costs competitive and manufacturing partner accountable. Then working with multiple apparel manufacturers gives brands and fashion designers a safety net should problems arise with individual suppliers. Finally, different manufacturers have different expertise based on product category, fabric, or other factors. Each manufacturer also has its own network of fabric suppliers and trim suppliers. Working with a diverse network of factories allows fashion brands to match product features with the best product experts for high-quality production across their entire inventory.
While as you might hear, “These are uncertain times,” the advantages listed above will benefit fashion brands now and even in more “normal” markets. Having a diversified fashion supply chain helps designers and fashion houses avoid unnecessary risks and equips them with a complete toolbox of resources to sourcing more complex inventory as seamlessly as possible.
3. Transparent Fashion Supply Chain Enabling Accountability
Fashion brands built on highly transparent fashion supply chains are competitive in three key areas of their business:
- How Transparency Helps Operations
Working with transparent supply chain partners makes it easy to maintain timely and accurate calculations of ingredients, production status, and production partners and product quality. The value of such transparency increases when your partners can offer you clear and specific communications and third-party and/or visual authentication of source, production and distribution.
- How Transparency Increases Employee Satisfaction
Transparency allows your employees to better align with your business mission, story and role within the larger fashion community. This can help them feel more involved in their role in your fashion business, a factor commonly found to increase employee happiness and loyalty in every industry.
- How Transparency Benefits Brand Reputation and Consumer Perception
Fashion labels, especially those that practice ethical manufacturing or use distinctive creative processes can benefit from appearing transparently on social media. That’s because, according to McKinsey, 52% of millennials, 45% of Gen-Z and 41% of Boomers research businesses before buying. Alongside product reviews and customer-generated content, transparently telling stories from your product supply chain can help your fashion label win respect and stand out in one of the loudest B2C industries out there.
Building and working with a highly connected fashion supply chain increases trust and accountability at all levels of the business. Whether you are talking to operations managers, clothing production directors, procurement directors, sales associates, fashion buyers, or digital marketers, the more transparent you make all aspects of your fashion business, including supply chain, the easier it will be to achieve every type of 21st century business goal. .
4. Predictive Mode Supply Chain Increases Efficiency and Impact
Every year, tech companies engineer more online tools to help fashion retailers track and drive sales and study marketing impact. This most valuable tool also provides data that fashion businesses can use to predict sales trends, chart recurring inventory needs, and automate customer interactions. Predictive data sourced from fashion tools like Fashion Snoops or WGSN provides a way for fashion brands to make inventory decisions and B2C activities as efficiently and with maximum impact.
Fashion brands that manufacture their own private label clothing or accessories benefit from using tools that allow them to not only map and predict B2C activity, but also events in their fashion supply chain. A digital platform that helps businesses monitor, alert, and predict milestones and challenges for fabric suppliers, manufacturing capacity, and international shipping automatically accelerates and simplifies experience planning and data-driven supply chain structure and maneuvering.
Using predictive analytics to support decision-making also gives fashion brands the ability to make critical historical data that drive impact universally available across businesses. That’s a huge advantage especially for the larger fashion houses. Legacy data empowers companies to train staff in reading and interpreting inventory trends from the regular season and from seasons that, like 2020, will have significant variation due to outside events. Democratizing access to predictive analytics across brands helps fashion businesses make less reactive and more informed supply chain recommendations in crisis contexts, using historical data of past events as a guide on how best to stabilize inventory planning as entering and exiting these events across supply chain.
5. Partnering Fashion Supply Chain Embodies Trust
Although the coronavirus pandemic presents challenges unlike any seen before, major disruptions to the global fashion industry are nothing new. From earthquakes that brought down factories, to fast and rising tariffs in major manufacturing hubs, the multiple logistics involved in procuring quality fabrics, hardware, and labor made planning a seamless supply chain a challenge to say the least. Nonetheless, one strategy that benefits fashion innovators is elevating supply chain vendors to the level of true partners.
Several things separate a regular supply chain vendor from a leading apparel manufacturing partner:
- Reliable Communication
This occurs when fashion brands and fashion suppliers engage in current and consistent conversations and production updates through easily accessible and documented communication channels. Ghosting, while always unprofessional, simply cannot happen in a true brand-to-supplier partnership.
- Skilled Collaboration
Most clothing factories can follow patterns and produce acceptable products. However, garment manufacturers committed to creating partnered brand-to-supplier experiences will take more initiative and feedback on design feasibility, fabric choices, etc. if needed. A partner-level fashion manufacturer must have the experience of fabricating, sampling and grading calls of these productions and the confidence to deliver them to brands with care and efficiency.
- A Scalable Relationship
Every fashion designer wants to increase their profitability year after year, and achieving that goal demands more from their team members and brand suppliers over time. While you may not know what the demand for your inventory will be in one, five, or ten years, it’s a good idea to stock your fashion supply chain with product experts who can reliably meet demand, whether it’s small batches or tens of thousands of units. per production run.
Adopting a supplier partnership mindset and approach requires a lot of trust. Note that this approach will not work with all supplier relationships. Unlike other qualifications from the modern fashion supply chain, developing a brand-to-supplier relationship with a partnered approach will require your fashion brand to invest in regular and reliable audit channels for your manufacturers and inventory.
After knowing about the explanation above, the next step is to start building your supplier network! To find out more, you can read this article! To learn how to select an apparel manufacturer for your own modern fashion supply chain. Read the next chapter to know more here!