Bringing Fashion Faster into the Market

In today’s world, it has become essential for apparel companies to introduce new products every couple of weeks. Fashion is changing with time – every new phase calls for new styles. Thus, companies that can introduce new styles faster than others will have an edge over their competitors.

However, most customers don’t realize how long these designs have been in work before they are actually released to the public. The design to market cycle starts right from when it is designed, and then sampled, selected, manufactured and then sold.  The product goes through a great journey before it reaches its end customers.

Earlier suppliers use to take as long as 52 weeks to bring a new product to market. Today, that lead-time would not be profitable for firms, because of the fast changing styles and fashion. Technology has been able to divide production time into two paths, “slow” path that is reduced to 25 weeks and “fast” path that is reduced to 17 weeks. Moreover, research (Infosys, 2008) suggests a further 8 weeks can be cut in the design- to- market cycle by re-engineering various processes for more efficient and effective working. This helps the apparel manufacturers to come to market with their new designs as many as six times in a year.

Various processes can be categorized into items such as lookbooks, web photography, transporting time from manufacturing factories to stores, and selection of designs. Then, it is necessary to review each and every process to successfully save time spent on these processes. At iShopShape, we consider it to be our mission to help the apparel suppliers to save considerable time on image making by equipping them with in-house studio for all photography work. And so far various large and small apparel manufacturers have availed of our services. Would you like to join this fast fashion race?

- Divya Chawla