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This paper aims to present an original conceptual model that captures the orientations of new business founders in the fashion design sector as they navigate the tension between creative endeavour and business practice.

The start‐up experiences of 38 fashion designers from the four main fashion centres in New Zealand were examined using an interpretive narrative approach. The designers' enterprise development narratives were analysed using in‐depth literary and conceptual analyses to reveal the nature and context of their start‐up behaviour and the conceptual frameworks they employed to make sense of their start‐up behaviour.

The designers were, to varying degrees, preoccupied with a perceived tension between creative processes and business practices. This tension was typically experienced as a disjunction between self‐identity and the identities supported by the business models designers worked within. Successfully navigating this tension could require significant conceptual shifts or fundamental adjustments in business approaches which challenged designers' original rationales for start‐up. The analysis of designers' responses to the creativity‐business tension and how they made sense of this produced a conceptual framework, a space delineated by three basic enterprise orientations: creative enterprise orientation (CEO), creative business orientation (CBO), and fashion industry orientation (FIO).

This conceptual framework has major implications for policy makers and providers of design education and business support as it offers a means of differentiating between the lived‐in experiences of designers. In so doing it could be used as a tool for tailoring support more appropriately to designers' needs. The narrative approach produced rich, contextualised insights and a template for the further studies that will be required to establish the wider applicability of the framework.

The original conceptual framework presented here provides much needed insight into creative business start‐ups that will allow better targeting of education, support and policy development. The approach used to create this framework is an innovative example of how narrative and sensemaking approaches can be combined to provide rich insights into enterprise creation from the entrepreneur's perspective.

Bridge lines represent a way for designers to expand their business, because typically designer merchandise is supplied to a limited number of stores. With bridge lines, the prices are lower and the line can be supplied to more stores. The bridge line market has been rapidly evolving in recent years. Retailers are paying close attention to this sector, particularly in the light of the stagnant demand for more expensive designer ready‐to‐wear collections. Despite the general economic recession, the culture of wearing fashion in the 1990s has paved the way to the growth of bridge lines.

This case study of a fashion-design company aims to show how a co-creation initiative produces competitive advantage by nurturing creativity, expanding the company’s innovation capabilities and enabling it to engage with both taste-making customers and designers from anywhere in the world.

In 2009, Fronteer Strategy, a Netherlands-based market-analysis firm published a conceptual framework for identifying specifically how a firm’s processes and initiatives employ co-creation. This case looks at how this theoretical framework compares with the actual complexities of the co-creation process developed by Own Label.

Own Label’s co-creation approach is a hybrid model that utilizes more than one type of co-creation across its fashion-design process.

What makes co-creation in design-intensive industries a disruptive approach is the democratization of the process by which design choices are made.

Own Label is utilizing its hybrid models of co-creation in order to strategically position its self in niche markets, adapt faster to trends, as well as to be a design leader.

Creative industries, such as the designer fashion industry (DFI), are among the toughest in which to establish sustainable business ventures. While studies have examined how networks and social capital contribute to independent DFI start-ups and why such businesses fail, these studies have been largely restricted to well-established entrepreneurial spaces like London, which differ in structure and size compared to emerging DFI entrepreneurial spaces in small economies like New Zealand. This chapter addresses this gap in the creative enterprise literature by presenting findings from an examination of 12 New Zealand fashion designers’ accounts of their responses to start-up challenges. The analysis, which paid particular attention to the relationship between social capital and reported strategic practice, revealed that the designers’ challenge profiles and strategic responses were linked to very ‘biographical’ personal networks and their personal enterprise orientations. While those designers with well-established networks started the most resilient businesses, the analysis revealed that even these designers were not necessarily particularly strategic when tapping into the social capital embedded in their networks. Overall, the findings provide further confirmation of the importance of social capital and network management during start-up. Most significantly, they demonstrate why designers need to be forward looking and employ a strategic approach to developing and accessing social capital and when making business decisions. Those who did so were more likely to have viable ventures than those who accessed social capital in order to react to unanticipated challenges.

This paper aims to provide an insight into how fashion designer businesses work and survive in London, with an understanding of business techniques and the survival strategies of British fashion designers.

The initial research demonstrated a need to define “innovation” as well as recognise the approach of “creative people” in business by exploring existing literature. This was followed by a series of structured interviews with nine British Fashion Designers in London, and three with intermediaries aimed at putting the designers' activities within a business context: a fashion PR; a lawyer specialising in fashion business and a creative director of a fashion distributor.

The research suggests ten survival strategies employed by fashion designers. The five fashion designers in a sustainable business all operated all of these principles. Those no longer in business operated between one and five of these principles. As designers gain experience and realise their “value“, there is evidence that they can get leverage for contractual agreements with licensors, which has led to financial growth of the designers' businesses. Strategies for diversification and consultancy, if managed without diluting design values, have also led to business growth and stability.

Further research is required to consider innovation and entrepreneurship in the different creative and cultural industries, particularly concerning issues and challenges for the creative person.

The implications are that designers need to be quick to understand the business and wider environment in which they are operating. More published material needs to be widely available to them concerning role models and business models relevant to this unique and problematic industry.

The value of this original research is to share experience and inform designers and practitioners of current practices.

This article sets out to explore the role of clothes as compensatory consumption in men’s lives from an experimental perspective, presenting preliminary findings from the current research based on case studies of three adult males. This is part of a much larger study into compensatory consumption currently being undertaken by the author. The article examines the men’s relationship with fashion and their shopping behaviour in the light of current literature on fashion, identity and consumer behaviour. The implications for fashion retailing are considered and proposals for future research put forward.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of product image at three stages of the consumer decision process for apparel products: alternative evaluation, purchase and post‐purchase stages. The three specific objectives of the study were to examine at the alternative evaluation stage the effect of product image on perceived quality and performance expectation, at the purchase stage the effect of product image on purchase intention and the price the consumer was willing to pay, and at the post‐purchase stage the effect of product image on consumer satisfaction and the effect of product image with product consumption performance on consumer satisfaction. The experimental design was used to determine the cause‐and‐effect relationships between the treatment variables (independent variables) and the dependent variables. Sweatshirts were used as the sample product category and 120 university students were recruited as participants. Results showed that at the alternative evaluation stage, product image significantly and positively influenced perceived quality and performance expectation. At the purchase stage, product image was not a determinant of purchase intention, but significantly and positively influenced the price participants were willing to pay for the product. At the post‐purchase stage, product image did not directly influence participants’ satisfaction, but product image with product consumption performance significantly affected satisfaction. When consumption performance was good, product image significantly and positively influenced satisfaction. When consumption performance was poor, product image significantly and negatively influenced satisfaction.

Asserts that the goods which retailers sell and the way in which they sell them impact significantly on the cultural fabric and pattern of civil life. Provides perspectives from both the past and current retail environment. Considers various methods by which retail distributors make interventions in the social life of communities. Concludes that there is a need for those who study retailing to move beyond such aspects as immediate profit maximization to embrace the concepts of macro retailing and thus achieve a greater understanding of the retail environment.

Given the high costs of creating and sustaining brands it is not surprising that organisations wish to capitalise as far as possible on these assets. Designers and their financial backers are also active in this process; many of their customers or would‐be customers aspire to the label but not at the market level initially catered for. Extending brands has, as the literature attests, implications for the designer, manufacturer, retailer and customer. The purpose of this small‐scale study was to examine the phenomenon at least as it relates to menswear, from the perspective of the independent retailer, who still has a major role to play in this market.

The purpose of this paper is to identify both the inspiration sources used by fast fashion designers and ways the designers sort information from the sources during the product development process.

This is a qualitative study, drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with the members of the in-house design teams of three Australian fast fashion companies.

Australian fast fashion designers rely on a combination of trend data, sales data, product analysis, and travel for design development ideas. The designers then use the consensus and embodiment methods to interpret and synthesise information from those inspiration sources.

The empirical data used in the analysis were limited by interviewing fashion designers within only three Australian companies.

This research augments knowledge of fast fashion product development, in particular designers’ methods and approaches to product design within a volatile and competitive market.