Clothing companies that adopt a mass customisation model can remain profitable while decreasing the fashion industry’s environmental impacts, new research has suggested.
THE RESEARCH: A Penn State Smeal College of Business-led team of researchers has found that a new business model may address the issue of overconsumption without burdening companies operating within the fiercely competitive fashion industry.
- The findings, published in the Journal of Operations Management, found that consumers are willing to pay more money for clothes they can customise and keep the items longer.
- The findings showed that providing customisation to cater for individual consumer tastes but at a mass scale — the idea of mass customisation applied to fashion — might help delay the eventual disposal.
- Mass customisation can be the basis for a new business model in fashion that is more sustainable and more profitable. By proving people will pay more for their personalised clothes, businesses can compensate by selling fewer clothes for more money, rather than selling more units of disposable clothing for less money. No business will adopt a practice that will hurt its ability to compete, or hurt their investors.
- The solution is practical because the technology currently exists to allow many people to personalise their products online. For example, customers can upload their pictures to a website to review different sunglass styles, or virtually try on clothes.
- Equally important, flexible manufacturing technologies exist to support such product customisation at a mass scale. For example, 3D printing and various other automation technologies make one-of-a-kind, serial production possible.
- The economics of such technologies, which are constantly improving, will naturally point the fashion industry toward mass customisation.
METHODOLOGY: To test the business model, the researchers conducted a pre-test, followed by two studies to investigate consumers’ reactions to varying degrees of the mass customisation of T-shirts.
- In the first study, 237 undergraduate students were randomly assigned to participate in person, where the team examined the effects of four customers’ involvement points — design, fabrication and use — on their willingness to pay for and hold onto the T-shirts.
- The customers could opt for readymade T-shirts produced by the firm, or what the researchers termed “use.” Alternatively, they could personalise their T-shirt by selecting from a range of existing colours and images provided by the firm, or “assembly.”
- For more extensive customisation, customers could create their own custom colour and select from the firm's library of pre-existing images, or “fabrication.”
- For the ultimate level of personalisation, called “design,” customers had the freedom to design a completely unique T-shirt by crafting their own custom colour and image.
- In the second study, the focus shifted to exploring different approaches to a single point of customer involvement in mass customisation.
- The team recruited 501 US participants, randomly assigning them to five different groups representing distinct customisation conditions.
- The researchers specifically investigated the influence of providing sample images in the design condition on how much the participants would pay for and how long they would keep the customised products.
- By randomly assigning participants to one of these conditions, the researchers were able to test how different aspects of customer involvement affect the overall mass customisation experience and its consequences.
What They Said:
What we were asking is: How do we find a way to provide product variety while not suffering significant cost on initial manufacturing expenses? The big idea is that we'd like for people to stop disposing of stuff as fast as they do.
— Dan Guide (Corresponding Author)
Smeal Chaired Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management
Pennsylvania State University
