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Fashion subscription service is a newly emerged retailing model that provides an innovative way of shopping to meet consumers’ fashion needs. From the perspective of innovation adoption, the purpose of this paper is to provide an insight of consumers’ perceptions as well as adoption intention of this innovative retailing format.

This research is qualitative in nature, utilizing focus group study approach. In this paper, content analysis was applied to analyze the data.

While possessing varying degrees of knowledge about fashion subscription retailing, the participants shared the following perceptions of relative advantages, including convenience, personalization, consumer excitement, opportunities to try new styles, and opportunity to better manage their apparel budget. Concerns mainly focused on missing social shopping experiences and the hassle in the cancellation process. The overall adoption intention was high.

Due to the nature of this research, the sample size was limited and results may not be generalized. This research paid less attention to individual differences, in terms of demographic and psychographic characteristics.

Future marketing could focus more on educating consumers about the attributes of the services they provide. Retailers can strategically leverage the positively perceived advantages in their marketing communications to enhance consumers’ adoption intention of their services.

The paper fills a gap in the literature on consumer behavior toward fashion subscription retailing and sheds light for companies in their endeavors to excel in this new retailing venue.

Continuous change has long been recognized as a core characteristic of retailing, its recent acceleration unprecedented, yet innovation in retailing remains under-researched, especially within fashion retailing. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to generate a deeper understanding of if, and to what extent, fashion retailers across different market segments are innovating in terms of in-store technology diffusion over time by taking a long-term perspective over five years.

Drawing on retail change and innovation diffusion theory, the study takes a qualitative approach, using direct observation of 71 fashion stores in London (UK) in 2014 and 2019. In total, 142 stores were tabulated in Excel and qualitatively analysed manually and with NVivo.

The findings identify the innovation adoption strategies implemented, the types of in-store technologies adopted over time and the fashion retail innovation adopters.

The research offers new knowledge in terms of retail innovation and retail change, specifically on retail diffusion of innovation and the importance of in-store technology integration. Several practical implications for improving technology innovation management are also identified.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of Chinese young consumers’ traits (fashion leadership, quality consciousness, price consciousness, environmental consciousness and social media usage) as the external factors on their behavioral intention toward using clothing subscription rental services.

Quantitative research was conducted, and empirical data were collected from 255 Chinese college students. Structural equation modeling was conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

The study offered convincing evidence that fashion leadership, price consciousness and social media usage are the three main drivers of Chinese young consumers’ favorable attitudes toward clothing subscription rental services, which together with social norms further lead to their intention to use clothing subscription rental services. Contrary to expectations, the study showed that consumers’ quality consciousness and environmental consciousness have no significant impact on consumer attitudes toward clothing subscription rental services. Moreover, the findings of the study demonstrated the impact of attitude and subjective norms on Chinese young consumers’ intention to use clothing subscription rental services.

This study contributes to the literature by integrating additional factors (fashion leadership, quality consciousness, price consciousness, consumer environmental knowledge, social media usage) into the traditional theory of reasoned action model to investigate how Chinese young consumers’ characteristics impact their attitudes and how their attitudes and subjective norms impact their intention toward using clothing subscription rental services.

To address the volatile nature of the retail industry, retailers have adopted clothing subscription services (CSS) to meet the demanding needs of consumers. This study provides insight into different types of CSS, as well as a process by which behavioural intentions are influenced by CSS type through cognitive dissonance (wisdom of purchase and emotional dissonance) and attitude towards the CSS.

An experimental design manipulating the CSS type (full/partial/none) was conducted among 358 US consumers to test the proposed hypotheses.

Hayes PROCESS macro model results demonstrated that consumers did not experience more cognitive dissonance towards a partially, fully curated or non-curated CSS. However, a significant interaction effect further uncovered that consumers with high aesthetic perception experience more negative wisdom of purchase towards a fully compared to a partially curated CSS, thereby impacting attitude and behavioural intention towards CSS.

Due to today's rapidly evolving retail industry, retailers endeavouring to engage in this business model should come up with strategies to turn a visitor into a subscriber and decrease hesitation in novice consumers. Moreover, retailers should ascertain consumers’ level of aesthetic perception as it plays an important role in CSS adoption.

We introduced a unique operationalization of CSS types by differentiating between fully, partially and non-curated subscriptions, which are commonly employed in the subscription-box marketplace. The previous literature rarely makes distinctions between these types, although our findings show that consumers perceive them differently.

The recent surge of subscription box services calls for research to understand how consumers respond to curation services. This study aims to develop and test a theoretical model to predict consumer response to AI (vs human). Particularly, the authors tested the role of stereotyping in shaping consumer perception of creativity in this context while considering the contextual moderators, shopping goals (hedonic vs utilitarian) and product category (fashion vs meal).

Two preliminary studies and the main study (total n = 761) tested the assumptions and hypotheses of the study. Preliminary study 1 (n = 511 Amazon mTurk, online survey) confirmed consumer stereotypes of humans and machines. Preliminary study 2, a single-factor between-subjects online experiment (recommender: human vs AI), was conducted at a large Midwestern university in the US (n = 56). The main study was conducted as a 2(recommender: human vs AI) × 2(product: fashion vs meal) × 2(goal: utilitarian vs hedonic) between-subjects online experiment (n = 194, Amazon mTurk).

The results confirmed that consumers are more likely to follow recommendations made by a human more than recommendations made by AI and the perceived creativity of the recommender explained the effect. Significant differences across product categories and shopping goals of the consumers were observed, calling for attention to the context of consumption.

This study extends the understanding of consumers' responses to recommendations in curation subscription services by highlighting the role of perceived creativity of humans versus AI.

The research aims to understand how smart speakers are perceived by their actual and potential users, their attitude towards smart speakers and consequently their intention to use them.

The authors apply a structural equation modelling (SEM) approach to test the research hypotheses through data coming from a structured questionnaire.

The results show that the higher the importance attributed to usefulness and ease of use, the higher the positive attitude that in turn positively affects the intention to use smart speakers. A significant relationship also emerged between task technology fit and attitude towards smart speakers, as well as between perceived enjoyment and attitude towards smart speakers. Perceived privacy risk, innovativeness and social attraction have been found to not significantly impact attitudes towards smart speakers.

Although several academic studies have focused on various aspects of smart technologies, only a few studies discuss the factors that push consumers to use smart speakers for activities related to commercial transactions. Therefore, looking at the rapid rise of smart speakers for daily tasks and the gradual acceptance of voice interaction with digital tools, the authors proposed a study about Italian users' intention to use smart speakers. Specifically, to fill the gap in the existing literature, the authors applied a SEM approach to identify utilitarian and hedonic benefits that motivate the use of these devices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the customer decision-making journey of high involvement female fashion consumers in the context of omnichannel fashion retailing.

The research is qualitative in nature, using a multi-method approach consisting of focus groups, semi-structured interviews, online diaries and follow-up interviews, with grounded theory applied to analyse the data.

The results of the study include a framework to outline the stages of the omnichannel customer decision-making journey for young high involvement female fashion consumers. The findings also reveal that an omnichannel decision-making journey is the one that predicated on risk and that consumers employ specific strategies to avoid such risks.

Due to the nature of this research, the sample size is limited and may not be generalised. Data collection was confined to Manchester, UK.

Customer journey mapping enables practitioners to view the entire shopping experience through the eyes of the customer and enables retailers' fault-find issues within the customer and brand experience.

The paper advances knowledge about fashion and consumer behaviour. The customer decision journey framework maps the emotional experiences, devices and channels encountered by high-involvement fashion consumers across each stage of the omnichannel journey.

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate Gen-Y men's implicit beliefs, perceptions of their appearance and apparel styling, degree of fashion involvement, novelty seeking behavior and attitudes/intention toward the new style subscription box retail model.

An online survey was used to collect data from adult men who were born between 1977 and 1994 residing in the USA. For data analyses, SPSS and AMOS were utilized for preliminary analysis and hypotheses testing with the structural equation modeling approach.

The findings of this research demonstrated that Gen-Y men's appearance management behaviors are guided by their innate mindsets or implicit theories, which further influenced their perceptions toward fashion and style subscriptions. Although Gen-Y men's degree of fashion involvement did not have a significant influence on their attitudes, this study found that their novelty seeking behavior positively influenced their attitudes and thus their intention to use style subscription box retail.

To the researchers' knowledge, this study is the first to explore the role of innate mindsets among male consumers in the Gen-Y group in the context of style subscription box retail. Therefore, the findings of the research will add theoretically grounded insights by linking the research area of the style subscription box retail and implicit theory appearance, as well as provide marketing strategies for style subscription box retailers.

The second annual conference of the Research Alliance of Fashion and Textiles (RAFT), hosted by the Department of Clothing Design and Technology of Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), took place in Manchester in June.