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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 chapter concerns itself with a garment factory in Trinidad, West Indies, producing brand-name clothing for the Eastern Caribbean market. Workers in this factory not only stitch garments for an hourly wage; but also stealthily operate a secondary assembly line, creating precise duplicates of the factory's products for themselves to take home and wear. Manufactured on the shop-floor alongside “legitimate” production, the copied garments are identical in every way to the genuine ones they mimic. In this chapter, I argue that workers have created a “loop” in the value chain: a simultaneous moment in which they are both producers and consumers of the factory's products. While “genuine” garments circulate through market-capitalist networks of exchange, copied garments only circulate through social networks – thereby accruing and representing forms of “value” that are distinct from market value. By looping the value chain, factory workers create non-market values alongside market-oriented ones, showing both sets of values to be interdependent. Workers’ own commentary on these processes offers a unique window onto contested meanings of “value” at work on the shop-floor.

Buying secondhand clothing is not only interesting for consumers wanting to save money but also for sustainable clothing enthusiasts. It is now among a number of consumption practices which slow down fast fashion production while saving 10 to 20 times the energy (Fletcher, 2008, p. 100). While most of the recent scholarly work focuses on secondhand consumers (Bianchi & Birtwistle, 2010; Franklin, 2011; Norum, 2015), this paper aims to examine business activities. This perspective from economic anthropology enhances understandings of secondhand clothing, as research to-date has tended to neglect the semiotic function of clothing while underlining exchanges. To gain insight into the dynamics of the sector in Germany today, two businesses from Hamburg have been ethnographically examined by the author since 2014. This study outlines their work practices and explains the development of this high-end segment of the market from the 1970s until the digital age. For businesses, the digitalization of the trade has had massive effects on their business practice because it seems to solve inherent problems connected to the selling of pre-owned clothing. I argue that the digitalization did not only promote acceptance of buying secondhand clothing in Germany but also the emergence of new businesses models.

In “the century of culture,” a current drift is toward utilizing cultural heritage branding. Cultural heritage brand referred to in this study means a brand with value proposition based on cultural heritage. As Asian cultures are gathering global focus amid ongoing trend of exoticism and the growth of Asian economies, there is more opportunity especially for Asian brands to benefit from cultural heritage branding. Also, the advantages of cultural heritage branding can benefit fashion brands, considering that designs of great importance in fashion brand's competitiveness can earn creativity and originality from cultural heritage.

Therefore, this study (1) profiles cultural heritage fashion brands based on Asia: Japan, China, and Korea, (2) identifies components of cultural heritage fashion branding by comparative analysis, and (3) identifies characteristics in brand management strategy from the brands, and offer managerial implications for upcoming cultural heritage fashion brands.

This study adopts a case study approach that focuses on Asian fashion brands; Issey Miyake (Japan), Shanghai Tang (China), and Damyeon designed by Lee Hye Soon (Korea). The analytical contents of this research include general profiles (i.e., brand history, brand philosophy and concept, and BI and visual representation), cultural heritage perspectives and brand management perspective (i.e., product, price, place, promotion, and brand extension). Most of the information was retrieved from multiple sources including books, academic papers, brand's annual report, brand official website, news articles, etc.

Overall, this study shows cultural heritage fashion branding can be useful in distinctiveness in positioning and delivering brand value in depth, authenticity, and credibility for customers (Urde, 2007). The findings suggest some managerial as well as cultural heritage-related indications for upcoming cultural heritage fashion brands.

Although common components of cultural heritage fashion branding (i.e., utilization of traditional prototype, emphasis on traditional fabric, and preservation of traditional craftsmanship) were drawn out, achieving optimal balance between tradition and modernity was found critical as well. Managerial guidelines include foreign brand naming, premium pricing, art-related promotions, and extension for a total lifestyle brand. In further research, the type of industry and different country-of-origins can be applied in order to extensively study about the issue of cultural heritage branding.

This paper proposes a holistic, resource-based strategy framework for design-oriented industries consisting mainly of small firms. It consists of three main concepts: (1) sources of competitive advantage, especially core competencies, (2) competitive advantage, and (3) competitive strategy. The idea behind the framework is that sources of competitive advantage form the competitive advantages of firms, and these together influence the choice of competitive strategies. The proposed framework was developed on the basis of interview results from the jewellery industry in Finland. A total of 44 small firms each employing less than 25 people were interviewed. Respondents felt that the two most important core competencies were in the area of manufacturing. They were the abilities to design and manufacture products of high technical quality and to offer a broad range of products and attractive models. For the jewellery industry, competitive advantage was largely achieved through various aspects of design. The competitive strategy type most employed was the differentiation-based strategy. The proposed framework should be of value in integrating some of the diverse research in this area and suggesting specific relationships that might be the focus of future empirical studies.

China represents around 20% of the world's population, and her economy is still performing well under economic crisis. Historical events have shaped different parts of China with different economic developments and cultural encounters. The most prominent difference is between Hong Kong and the Mainland. This chapter would like to examine the development and issues of fashion retailing in China. For better understanding, this chapter starts with a brief discussion on apparel industry development and fashion culture in Hong Kong and the Mainland, follows by historical development and then presents systems of fashion retailing in both Hong Kong and the Mainland. Desktop research and exploratory research techniques were employed. Stores of international fashion luxury brands in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing were visited. Comparison of branding issues, particularly for luxury market in Hong Kong and the Mainland are discussed, so are future directions of fashion retailing in these places.

Chapter 4 shows and tells how to create visual art to achieve deep understanding about stories that individuals tell. Creating visual narrative art (VNA) of stories achieves several objectives. First, creating VNA revises and deepens sense-making of the meaning of events in the story and what the complete story implies about oneself and others. Second, creating VNA surfaces unconscious thinking of the protagonist and other actors in the story as well as the storyteller (recognizing that in many presentations of stories an actor in the story is also the storyteller); unconscious thinking in stories relating to consumer and brand experiences reflect one or more archetype (Jung 1916/1959) fulfillments by the protagonist and the storyteller; given that almost all authors agree on a distinction between processes that are unconscious, rapid, automatic, and high capacity, (System 1 processing) and those that are conscious, slow, and deliberative (System 2 processing, see Evans, 2008), VNA enables and enriches processing particularly relating to system 1 processing–enabling more emotional versus rational processing. Third, creating VNA of stories is inherently and uniquely fulfilling/ pleasurable/healing for the artist; using visual media allows artists to express emotions of the protagonist and/or audience member, to vent anger, or report bliss about events and outcomes that words alone cannot communicate; VNA provides a tangible, emotional, and holistic (gestalt) experience that is uniquely satisfying and does so in a form that many audience members enjoy over and over again. Chapter 4 elaborates on the rationales for its central proposition, briefly reviews relevant literature on VNA, and illustrates one mode of VNA for the complementary stories told by a consumer and brand.