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This research critically investigates product development in the context of fast fashion online retailers who are developing “own label” fashion clothing. With a focus upon inputs, outputs, planning and management in order to comprehensively map the interplay of people, processes and the procedures of the product development process adopted.

Qualitative research method was employed. Face-to-face semi structured in depth interviews were conducted with key informants from market leading fast fashion online retailers in the UK.

The major findings of this research demonstrate the disruptions in the product development process in contemporary and challenging fashion retailing and a new “circular process” model more appropriate and specific to online fast fashion businesses is presented.

The research has implications for the emerging body of theory relating to fashion product development. The research is limited to UK online fashion retailers, although their operations are global.

The findings from this study may be useful for apparel product development for retailers considering an online and fast fashion business model.

The emergent process model in this study may be used as a baseline for further studies to compare product development processes.

Food retailers invest heavily in design expertise to create exciting packaging to entice customers to buy premium food products, and to strengthen their competitive edge. The process by which food retailers manage food packaging design has not been documented and this is an oversight in the design management and retailing literatures that this paper addresses. An in‐depth case study of one of the top four UK retailers is presented and their approach pack design management is analysed and discussed. The process outlined here was in place in 1997 at a time when the retailer had just moved from number three in the market place to number two and was aiming to be number one. The process documented is that of a dynamic growing food retailer working on improving its brand image through packaging design.