Strategic Issues and Challenges in the Fashion Industry

Project

Contents
Question 1. Identify and analyze three strategic issues facing the overall sector of your chosen
business or service.....................................................................................................................................3
Question 2. Identify and analyze three challenges facing your chosen company or service................6
Question 3. Identify and analyze the three solutions to address the challenges facing your chosen
company or service....................................................................................................................................8
Question 4. Explain how your company or service could practically implement one solution from
those listed in Question 3.........................................................................................................................11
REFERENCES........................................................................................................................................14

Question 1. Identify and analyze three strategic issues facing the overall sector
of your chosen business or service.
The fashion industry is one of the fastest growing industries across the world and
involves various sectors like production of the raw material, designing and production of fashion
goods by the designers, retail sales etc. There are many issues that are faced by the fashion
industry. Some of the same are explained below-
Global Warming – Global Warming is one of the issues that has been faced by the
fashion industry over the last few years. The fashion industry comprises of various stages before
the production of finished products. This leads to an increase in the amount of pollution that can
be harmful for the environment (Ritter and Conrad, 2016). Apart from the raw materials, the
energy that is used in the manufacturing, transporting and packing the final products are also
known too contribute to harmful emissions. Human activities have contributed enough to the
climate change and as a result there is extreme weather that includes droughts, heatwaves, floods
etc. There has also been a change in the temperature, humidity, rainfall etc. Not only humans, but
animals as will also be impacted by this. This can be explained by talking about COVID-19 or
coronavirus, which is a respiratory infection that is caused by a relatively new virus (Duke,
2016). According to a study, the climate change is expected to impact humans through an
occurrence of infectious disease.
The millennials constitute the largest part of the population world wide and is anticipated
to grow continuously. There is a need that the fashion industry implements various methods to
go green that will not harm the environment (Kaur, Kumar and Kumar, 2017). Coronavirus has
been spreading across different countries of the world rapidly and the countries have not been
able to respond to it. If this continues to grow, it will start impacting the climate like for
example, the habitats will be destroyed, ecosystems will no longer be balanced etc. Coronavirus
has led to a significant decline in the levels of nitrogen dioxide in countries like China and Italy.
It has also been reported that the virus has led to a decline in the number of pollutants in the air
as well as other warming gases in some cities (Coronavirus: Air pollution and CO2 fall rapidly
as virus spreads, 2020). Therefore, there is a requirement that the fashion industry moves

towards sustainable manufacturing and production of the clothing items so that there is no harm
caused to the environment.
Theory of change
The theory of change explains the reason behind why a particular change is expected to
occur. It primarily focuses on change initiatives and how can they help in achieving desired goals
and objectives. Required log-term change is to eradicate coronavirus and other aspects like
global warming that affect the environment. But in order to do so, there should be less use of
machines and equipment that emits harmful gases.
High Competition – The fashion industry has a lot of organizations that offer fashion
related products to the customers. The companies also pose threat and competition to each other
as they want to gain a competitive advantage over each other and attract a large number of
customers. Due to the outbreak of coronavirus, different industries including the fashion industry
had to stop operating. The companies have stopped their plan of expanding to other geographic
regions because the overall sales of the companies have gone down. This has also impacted their
productivity as well as profitability. People are cancelling orders that they had already placed
and have been asking for refunds. Due to this, the companies have kept their plans of growth and
expansion on hold. But on the other hand, it is known that the virus cannot survive on surfaces,
therefore, there is a low risk of the coronavirus spreading through products and packages that are
shipped over few weeks (Can Online Shopping Give You Coronavirus?, 2020).
The fashion industry is known among the most competitive industries in the world and
has grown exceptionally over the last years. And competition is one of the major issues that the
companies operating in the industry face (Thierfelder and Kabisch, 2016). It can be said that
COVID-19 has impacted different business irrespective of their sizes across the world and thus,
it is important to communicate any important information with the customers properly. The
fashion industry should use all the channels like website, social media, emails etc. that are
available with it effectively to communicate problems relating to delivery. This way, the
customers will remain informed and there will not be any confusion. This is important because
due to the outbreak of coronavirus, organizations in the fashion industry have to put their
operations on hold. Instead of competing with each other, it is important that the companies
should adopt measures in order to protect and safeguard their employees from the coronavirus