Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain Management : From Sourcing to Retailing

This handbook is a compilation of comprehensive reference sources that provide state-of-the-art findings on both theoretical and applied research on sustainable fashion supply chain management. It contains three parts, organized under the headings of “Reviews and Discussions,” “Analytical Research,” and “Empirical Research,” featuring peer-reviewed papers contributed by researchers from Asia, Europe, and the US. This book is the first to focus on sustainable supply chain management in the fashion industry and is therefore a pioneering text on this topic.

In the fashion industry, disposable fashion under the fast fashion concept has become a trend. In this trend, fashion supply chains must be highly responsive to market changes and able to produce fashion products in very small quantities to satisfy changing consumer needs. As a result, new styles will appear in the market within a very short time and fashion brands such as Zara can reduce the whole process cycle from conceptual design to a final ready-to-sell “well-produced and packaged” product on the retail sales floor within a few weeks. From the supply chain’s perspective, the fast fashion concept helps to match supply and demand and lowers inventory. Moreover, since many fast fashion companies, e.g., Zara, H&M, and Topshop, adopt a local sourcing approach and obtain supply from local manufacturers (to cut lead time), the corresponding carbon footprint is much reduced. Thus, this local sourcing scheme under fast fashion would enhance the level of environmental friendliness compared with the more traditional offshore sourcing. Furthermore, since the fashion supply chain is notorious for generating high volumes of pollutants, involving hazardous materials in the production processes, and producing products by companies with low social responsibility, new management principles and theories, especially those that take into account consumer behaviours and preferences, need to bedeveloped to address many of these issues in order to achieve the goal of sustainable fashion supply chain management.

The topics covered include Reverse Logistics of US Carpet Recycling; Green Brand Strategies in the Fashion Industry; Impacts of Social Media on Consumers’ Disposals of Apparel; Fashion Supply Chain Network Competition with Eco-labelling; Reverse Logistics as a Sustainable Supply Chain Practice for the Fashion Industry; Apparel Manufacturers’ Path to World-class Corporate Social Responsibility; Sustainable Supply Chain Management in the Slow-Fashion Industry; Mass Market Second-hand Clothing Retail Operations in Hong Kong; Constraints and Drivers of Growth in the Ethical Fashion Sector: The case of France; and Effects of Used Garment Collection Programmes in Fast Fashion Brands.

Tsan-Ming Choi (Jason) is currently Professor of Fashion Business at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Over the past ten years, he has actively participated in a variety of research projects on supply chain management and applied optimization for fashion business operations. He has authored/edited eleven research handbooks. He has published extensively in leading journals such as Annals of Operations Research, Automatica, Decision Support Systems, European Journal of Operational Research, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, Journal of the Textile Institute, Production and Operations Management, Service Science (INFORMS Journal), Textile Research Journal, etc. He has consulted several listed companies on supply chain management related topics. He is currently an area editor/associate editor/guest editor of Annals of Operations Research, Asia-Pacific Journal of Operational Research, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, European Management Journal, IEEE Systems Journal, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Systems, Information Sciences, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Production and Operations Management, Sustainability, Transportation Research - Part E. He has also served as an executive committee member/officer of professional organizations such as IEEE-SMC(HK) and POMS(HK) over the past several years. He received the President's Award for Excellent Achievement of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2008. Most recently, he received the Best Associate Editor Award of IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society in two consecutive years - 2013 and 2014. Before joining his current department in fall 2004, he was an assistant professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

T. C. Edwin Cheng is Dean of the Faculty of Business and Chair Professor of Management at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He obtained a B.Sc.[Eng](First Class Honours) from the University of Hong Kong, an M.Sc. from the University of Birmingham, U.K., and a Ph.D. and an Sc.D. from the University of Cambridge, U.K. He has previously taught in Canada, England, and Singapore. Prof. Cheng’s research interests are in Operations Management and Operations Research. He has published over 600 papers in such journals as California Management Review, Journal of Operations Management, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Operations Research, Organization Science, Production and Operations Management, and SIAM Journal on Optimization. He has co-authored 11 books published by Chapman and Hall, McGraw-Hill, and Springer. He received the Outstanding Young Engineer of the Year Award from the Institute of Industrial Engineers, U.S.A., in 1992 and the Croucher Award (the top research award in Hong Kong) in 2001. According to the ISI Web of Science, he has attained an h-index of 43 and generated over 7,500 non-self citations. A 2009 paper in the International Journal of Production Economics ranked him as the most productive researcher and the top 12th h-index researcher in Production/Operations Management in the world over the half-century 1959-2008. Over the years, Prof. Cheng has secured more than US$5 million in research funding from both public and private sectors to support his diverse research programmes.