ICT Development and Customer Participation in Fashion Industry

Abstract

With the pervasiveness of digital environment and expansion of new media, ICT (Information and Communication Technology) leads the role of consumer to change from a passive customer into an active co-producer. As customer participation in the fashion industry increases, this study attempts to explore the cases of customer participation as a co-producer in fashion industry through analyzing business models of companies, including Threadless, Blank label, Cut on Your Bias, Acustom Apparel, Thinkgivers. The results show that customer participation is mainly facilitated through design participation in fashion industry, with different level of participation and IT as well as different contribution target. Compared to the past, consumer's preference is reflected through participation before the stage of production. Results indicate three main characteristics of customer participation in fashion industry. First, value co-creations using customer experiences and understanding customer needs are important. Second, active online communication among customers are critical. Third, it is important to ensure customer's own item. From a customer perspective, participation enables them to purchase their own distinctive product and offers exciting experience and satisfaction over the production processes, and compensation can be used to increase customer participation. On the other hand, companies using customer participation can take advantage of cost reduction in product development, inventory, and marketing. Customer participation, as a win-win strategy for business and consumer, is expected to expand further in the future with the development of ICT.

Customized CAD Modeling and Design of Production Process for One-Person One-Clothing Mass Production System

“…Concerning the participating-type service, Yoon-Jung Kim, Jong-Yeon Na, and Yuri Lee [4] analyzed five fashion services, and their common characteristics were as follows. First, all the design elements were included.…”

“…Such a method aimed to allow customers to ultimately produce their own item(s). Although the above researchers expected that there would be a limit in achieving this objective as these services were using a voting method, they also expected that the development of ICT would allow the range and the utilization of these services to be expanded further [4]. In 2009, Sanders and Simons distinguished the starting point of the participating-type services into the following four stages: First, the Design Stage where customer requirements are presented from the start, intervening in the design process.…”

“…That is, although implementation of a 3D-based internet shopping mall requiring some expensive high-end technologies and high-end specifications may have been an attempt to provide more detailed information to the customers, the research result showed that a few photos of a dress could have delivered the information better and more accurately. On the other hand, Hye-Jung Shin and Hye-Yeon Kim (2015) and Yoon-Jeong Kim, Jong-Yeon-Na and Yuri Lee (2015) found that there was only one case where an MTM-type customizing service was used for simple clothing (bottom underwear) among the commercialized customized fashion services [32][33][34][35]. There were no other examples of a 3D-based simulation using real-time 3D rendering technology.…”

“…A customer-participating clothing platform was used as an example for the research as this platform was a sort of web platform, including the service that best corresponds to the ultimate objective of such a service, proposed by Yun Jeong Kim et al (2015) [4], a service without 'limitations'.…”

“…Currently, the commercialized garment customizing services are largely divided into the Made-To-Measure (MTM)-type services and the customer-participating-type services, and the latter is a high-value service, which can express the customer's individuality as his/her idea can be put into the design, which allows the elements, such as images, colors, etc., to be digitally printed for production [3][4][5][6]. Although many more customer-participating garment customizing services adopting the digital printing technology is emerging, there are still some problems to be solved.…”