Alliances: The vision of future fashion industry

In an industry known for its aggressively viable and fast moving spirit, designers, retailers, brands and manufacturers need to welcome collaborations in order to stay alive.

Alliances through high street retailers, as per WGSN report, has been a stimulating way for brands to strike into modern fashion – or a celebrity’s fashion statement of the time. So why do the industry biggies so resist a collaboration both at the fore front or the back-end of the businesses?

Alliances will always impact businesses on the whole from day one. From merchandise, sources, practices, trades, philosophy to maintaining the business. At every phase of the existing workflow, it becomes critical to look at more spontaneous, imaginative and collective interpretations for the teams involved.

The need for partnerships arises at the initial stages, where style and inspirations unite music, art, photography and consumer-led muse with marketing acumen, business practice and not to forget the ‘gut feeling’ for the magical mishmash: freshness and salability.

Brands that have methods or structures to enable partnerships build ethos of adding up and empowering effortlessly – finally resulting in the quality of merchandise. When players are given noticeable prominence, and have easy ways to collaborate, the way that merchandise created is well-organized and driven, with energies and facts brought to line and allocated promptly.

More so, the capacity for brands to buy merchandises that actually sell and do not end up on sale or in landfills, is a critical issue. Figures shown in various reports talk of brands like H&M destroying £28M of stock in FY 17/18, or the $38Bn dead stock projected in the US every year reveal the real costs.

Hence, there is a rudimentary prerequisite for organizations and alliances around the stocks utilized – currently, right from designs, samples, or even yarns etc. are stacked away into distinct divisions and saved as compendiums or records.

What is being overlooked by the industry by not creating its own ingenious partnerships, allowing the coordination instead of perplexing or protecting their own assets?

This organically takes us through an imperative and crucial want for an enduring evolution of the way we work and how have our past systems influenced on the sustainability of the fashion industry. Procedures that have steered the production means and yields have created havoc, not only on the climate but also transversely towards societies overhauling the fashion industry. Only if the digital age today has educated us on something, it is how much more answerable we have to be with the tangible resources that we have, along with the valuable means it takes to create them.

This subject has always been in question in the past on whether or not the end customers worry on how the reserves are utilized – Thank god it’s beginning to change. We all recognize that it is not for the user to choose how the industry works – it is for the industry to be preemptive and make mindful choices that will revolutionize the effect and after-effects of our ways of work. Fashion however is a global business that has always worked through pool resources at some point or the other. The potential of the Fashion industry is hinged onto the industry to take inter-business alliances to new statures – with new ambitions.

Gulbash Duggal

Associate Dean, ICF