HTML Preview Fashion Company Description page number 1.
Fast Fashion: Business Model Overview and Research
Opportunities
Felipe Caro
∗
Victor Mart´ınez-de-Alb´eniz
†
April 25, 2014
To appear in Retail Supply Chain Management: Quantitative Models and Empirical
Studies, 2nd Edition, Narendra Agrawal and Stephen A. Smith (Editors), Springer, New
York, NY.
(Please do not distribute without the authors’ permission)
Fast fashion is a business model that offers (the perception of) fashionable clothes at
affordable prices. From an operations standpoint, fast fashion requires a highly responsive
supply chain that can support a product assortment that is periodically changing. Though
the underlying principles are simple, the successful execution of the fast-fashion business
model poses numerous challenges. We present a careful examination of this business model
and discuss its execution by analyzing the most prominent firms in the industry. We then
survey the academic literature for research that is specifically relevant or directly related
to fast fashion. Our goal is to expose the main components of fast fashion and to identify
untapped research opportunities.
1. Introduction
The global apparel industry has experienced a compound annual growth rate of 4.3% since
2000, reaching a market size of USD 1.7 trillion in 2012 (Euromonitor International 2013).
The growth has not only been in terms of revenue. The number of pieces of clothing pur-
chased per capita increased from 9.0 in 2000 to 13.9 in 2012 worldwide, and in countries like
the United Kingdom it has increased from 18.7 to 29.5 over the same period (Euromonitor
International 2013). Part of the growth embedded in these figures has been attributed to the
∗
†
Alb´eniz’s research was supported in part by the European Research Council - ref. ERC-2011-StG 283300-
REACTOPS and by the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness (Ministerio de Econom´ıa y
Competitividad, formerly Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovaci´on) - ref. ECO2011-29536.
1