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sustaInaBlE FashIon : a handBooK For Educators
In the past three years a transformation of the image of
ethical clothing from hippy to hip has taken place, and
phrases like ‘green is the new black’ and ‘you can now
be stylish and eco-friendly’ are rather ‘last season’. The
opportunities to achieve competitive advantage simply by
offering an ethical product option or range are probably
no longer there. However, that doesn’t mean that ethical
products are irrelevant to competitive advantage; but
that the way in which competitive advantage is achieved
needs to be more sophisticated and tuned into the type of
customer the brand is appealing to, both in terms of their
attitude to ethical products (see item 2) and their fashion
design preferences.
Brands like People Tree, Howies, and Edun, for example,
have similar market positioning in terms of price and
commitment to ethical products. They achieve competitive
advantage over others at the upperend level of the mass
fashion market on the basis of their ethical stance; however,
they differentiate themselves from one another on the
basis of product design and brand identity. Likewise, at the
designer level of the fashion market, Katherine E. Hamnett
and Stella McCartney are cited as ethical brands, but the
collections are very different in terms of design appeal.
In the middle mass market many brands, including
both retailers and producers, have introduced organic
or Fairtrade labelled products or ranges as an option.
Examples include: Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury, Next, H&M,
Levis and Gap. Whilst these moves were noteworthy in
both the fashion trade and the national press in 2006,
there is a danger that they are now considered to be
simply chasing the ethical pound (FEI discussion paper).
Additionally, and unsurprisingly, there is considerable
confusion and mistrust in the consumer market about
the terms used and the claims made by companies.
Nevertheless, in April 2008, a poll conducted by Marketing
Week magazine put Marks & Spencer as the ‘greenest
brand’, suggesting that their high profile marketing
communications in conjunction with their corporate
social responsibility Plan A has had a positive effect on
consumers’ perception of their commitment to ethical
issues (Morgan, 2008). The time may not be so far away
when the absence of an ethical offer could put a fashion
company at a competitive disadvantage. Tesco, for example,
has not managed to convince audiences of an ethical
orientation despite a plethora of green initiatives and
announcements in 2007/8; the company managed to gain
the highest number of mentions when marketers were
asked to say which brands had made the fewest real
inroads in green issues over recent years (Morgan, 2008).Nevertheless, given the rise of ethical consumerism,
‘chasing the ethical pound’ makes commercial sense if your
customers show preference for ethical products; and it
seems that brands that have niche appeal are including
ethical products because they know that their customers
will respond positively to this product feature. ‘Street-
wear’ brands like Converse, Carhartt, SP:UK and Matix, for
example, have all had ‘ethical’ products within their ranges,
yet are not overtly ‘ethical’ brands.This brings us to the idea of brand positioning which, like
competitive advantage, is an important strategic concept,
particularly in a crowded and complex consumer market
like fashion. Successful fashion branding uses a blend of
a number of ‘positioning variables’ such as price, quality,
fashionability, sportiness, ethical, and so on, that together
allow a brand to find its own space in the market. Once
this space has been found, the company can use marketing
communications to reinforce or defend that space. The
extent to which a company can use ethical claims in
their marketing communications relies on the integrity
of their ethical supply chain – which is why so few do it!
A truly ethical supply chain could give an organisation
real competitive advantage; the most valuable types of
competitive advantages are the sustainable ones and the
ones that are most difficult to copy, and so a truly ethical
supply chain could be one of the most effective sources
of competitive advantage. Interestingly, the partnership
between Topshop and People Tree in the form of a
concession was reported to be having difficulties because
of supply chain issues such as longer lead times due
to hand crafting techniques (Just-style.com, 2006). For
the time being, the fashion industry and the consumer
market will have to accept that some market positions are
impossible to achieve, such as low priced, high quality, truly
ethical, catwalk-inspired fashion!