Strategic Design Opportunities to Increase Sustainable Fashion Awareness and Behaviour

Abstract

Fast fashion, with its focus on cheap clothing and everchanging trends, has an enormous negative environmental and social impact. Despite rising consumer awareness and slow fashion as an emerging trend, many consumers often still rely on fast fashion. This research aims to create insights into why customers keep returning to fast fashion and what is holding them back from buying sustainable fashion. This is done through a quantitative survey (n=521) and qualitative semi-structured interviews (n=9). Based on the findings, opportunities are defined for designers on how, where, and when to intervene, and on which target group to focus. The main obstacles that counter slow fashion are (i) a lack of understandable and clear information, (ii) the price or available budget, and (iii) the importance of social influence. Strategic design interventions should focus on educating eco-conscious and social-conscious customers based on their personal definition of sustainable fashion. By providing in-store information during time of purchase, designers can create new shopping experiences, educate customers using a positive note and build customer relations with the retailer. Further research should extend these insights with retailers' perspectives.

Unsupervised Sampling Analysis on Consumer Exposure to Fast Fashion Consumption

“…Many of them who support sustainable and ethical consumption are not willing to avoid fast fashion completely. According to Das et al [2021], the biggest obstacles to the sustainable consumption of clothing goods are, on the one hand, that there is a lack of comprehensible and clear information on slow fashion and, on the other hand, that the products that are above the available budget are not very attractive to consumers. Research also shows that hedonic motivations have a larger effect on consumer attitudes and shopping intentions than motivations in the sense of practicality, usefulness and functionality (Pop et al [2023]).…”