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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.

As design becomes more important for business, designers and business people need to work together more. However, they tend to find the relationship difficult, challenging and less productive than either side would wish. The purpose of this paper is to help both designers and business people work more productively with one another.

The paper identifies the underlying schism between validity, which is favored by designers, and reliability, which is favored by business people, as the source of the relationship conflict. It then uses the key attributes of validity and reliability to form recommendations for each side to deal better with their counterparts.

There are five practical and actionable things that designers can do to work better with business people and five equivalent things that business people can do to work better with designers.

Currently, neither business people nor designers have a productive or coherent theory as to why their counterparts behave in ways that appear to them to be unproductive. To fill the theory gap, they tend to think badly of their counterparts. This paper provides both sides a productive theory of the other and a prescription for utilizing the theory to promote more productive collaboration.

Mastering aesthetics is a precious source of competitive advantage in creative industries. In fashion, innovation is reflected by how and how much styles change. Elite designers claim to be the only endogenous force shaping fashion innovation season by season. Yet, each season, fashion critics vet the new collections these designers introduce, assessing what is original as opposed to reworked and uninspired, in this way playing a fundamental role as gatekeepers in setting taste within the industry. In this research, we document how stylistic innovation, vis-à-vis the styles premier design houses introduced each season, is impacted, among the others, by the specific exogenous force of critics' assessments of designers' past work. Our data, which include 61 measures detailing the styles introduced by 38 prestigious Italian and French design houses over a nine-year period, suggest designers move further away from styles reviewed less favourably while adhering more closely to styles reviewed more positively. Additionally, the styles a designer introduces are shown to depend on critical assessments of competing designers' styles, revealing how design houses attend to each other's work. This work documents the strong correlation between style dynamics and critics' feedback. It also has important implications for any company trying to find a balance between independence and conformity in setting its own unique positioning into the market.

Styling is plagued by prejudice in the literature on the management of design – making it a taboo to talk about styling and designers as stylists. At the same time, the ability of designers to shape the look and feel of products still represents the most defining work of designers. However, reduced to superficial changes in form, styling has been misrepresented as simplistic decoration that is of limited strategic interest for managers of design, especially when compared to the more immaterial (processual) qualities that the discipline has to offer.

In this chapter, we question the validity of the conceptualization above, arguing for a renewed interest in the work of designers as stylists. Building on a general reassessment of style in art and design, we appropriate Ackerman's (1962) work on style for studies on styling and the management of design. In doing so, we propose that styling relates to the problem-solving activities of companies, in which designers create and shape solutions and their expressions. By defining styling along these lines, we account for the ‘‘everyday’’ view that designers (as stylists) shape the look and feel of products, but we no longer disregard the central concern of designers to integrate their decisions on form and function when shaping the look and feel of new products in practice.

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.

Purpose: This chapter explores how Russian fashion designers, as cultural intermediaries operating in the marketplace, interpret patriotism, which has become a noticeable phenomenon in Russia.

Methodology/Approach: Patriotism is approached as an appeal to patria and is considered as a socially constructed category. To explore the construction of patriotism, this research uses Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality. In the market, the state, commercial companies, media, and consumers co-produce the dispositif of patriotism, which conducts the creative conduct of fashion designers and encourages them to follow patriotic fashion. At the same time, fashion designers have freedom to conduct themselves and act in different ways.

Findings: Interpretations of patriotism within a patriotic dispositif are explored vis-à-vis the interpretations of patriotism articulated by fashion designers. In addition to patriotic fashion, the forms of their creative conduct or counter-conduct are manifested in such subtypes of patriotism in fashion as cosmopolitan patriotism, economic patriotism, cultural patriotism, and fashion localism.

Research Limitations/Implications: The research is mainly limited to a perspective of fashion designers, and to some extent of the government, and does not consider the perspective of consumers.

Originality/Value: The research develops a theoretical argument of patriotism as a tool of governmentality, juxtaposing it to the approach of patriotism as an ideology. This chapter also contributes to the studies of resistance, adding the perspective of cultural intermediaries contrary to the commonly studied perspective of consumers.

Construction industry is a vital sector for economic and national development. However, the industry suffers buildability problems. Improving construction projects buildability is the duty of every key stakeholder. Thus, this study aims to identify and evaluate the project designers’ roles in improving construction projects buildability in Nigeria.

This study adopted quantitative research method. A purposive sampling approach was used in identifying the representative sample for the administration of the questionnaire survey. A total of 122 questionnaires were distributed to the targeted construction professionals, out of which 93 questionnaires were sufficiently filled and returned, representing a response rate of 76%. This study used descriptive and inferential statistics for data analyses.

The results from factors analysis show that the roles of project designers in improving construction projects buildability in Nigeria can be categorised into two constructs: “discuss fully the design objectives with builders” and “prepare cost effective and buildable designs”.

This study contributed to more effective buildability studies by highlighting the roles of project designers in improving construction projects buildability in the construction industry. An understanding of these roles is vital for reducing buildability problems as well as for improving and embedding buildability as a practice in construction management.

This article aims to gain a better understanding of the reasons why serendipity is designed for in different kinds of environments. Understanding these design intents sheds light on the value such designs bring to designers, in contrast to the users of the environment. In this way, the article seeks to contribute to the literature on cultivating serendipity from a designers’ point of view.

An extensive review of the literature discussing designing for serendipity was conducted to elicit the different motivations to design for serendipity. Based on these findings and a thorough analysis, a typology of design intents for serendipity is presented.

The article puts forward four intents to design for serendipity: serendipity as an ideal, common good, mediator and feature. It also highlights that the current academic discourse puts a strong emphasis on two of them. It is argued that this academic abstraction could be problematic for how we deal with designs for serendipity, both in theory and practice.

The novelty of this article is that it addresses the question of why to design for serendipity from a designer’s point of view. By introducing the notion of directionality it opens up the opportunity to discuss serendipity from multiple perspectives, which contributes to gaining a firmer understanding of serendipity. It allows to more explicitly formulate the different functions of a design for serendipity and thereby expands our knowledge on the value of designing for serendipity. At the same time, it sheds light on the potential threats to designing for serendipity.

The success rate of new products is stubbornly low. This paper aims to explore the differences in how product designers and product managers approach the new product development task by comparing their perspectives on the process.

This study conducted a worldwide survey of professional product designers and managers and compared their perspectives.

Managers struggle to understand the problem to be solved until they see the solution in the form of an outstanding product design. Designers struggle to develop new products until they have a specific and insightful understanding of the problem that needs to be solved.

Designers’ and managers’ ways of thinking are different, and effective collaboration depends on them being cognizant of each other’s ways of thinking; the success of their work is highly interdependent.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first study that simultaneously investigates both product designers and managers to reveal the paradoxical dynamics between their perspectives.