Competitive strategy and performance of large global fast fashion companies, 1990-2023
Event details
Since the end of the 20th century, large global companies have developed in the clothing and accessories retail sector. Our paper analyses the evolution of the four companies that currently lead this market (the Spanish Inditex, the Swedish H&M, the Japanese Fast Retailing and the American Gap) in order to explain their different results. All four companies are considered fast fashion companies, one of the most successful business models in the fashion market in recent decades. Our hypothesis is that the companies' sales and profit results have been strongly influenced by the degree to which they have implemented the strategies characteristic of fast fashion. To test this, we first compare the trajectory followed by each of the companies, then define the main competitive strategies of fast fashion, examine the extent to which the companies have followed these strategies since the 1990s and finally analyse the effect of these strategies on the performance of each of the companies. For this study we have relied mainly on the wealth of qualitative and quantitative information provided by the companies' annual financial reports.
About the Speakers
José Antonio Miranda is Professor of Economic History at the University of Alicante (Spain) and principal investigator of the R&D&I project ‘Resilience and public policies in the evolution of Spanish industry, 1950-2019’. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Padua and at the University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’ (Italy). He specialises in the industrial development of Southern European countries and in Business History, and his main current research interests focus on industrial resilience and the evolution of fashion industries. He has published extensively on these topics.
Alba Roldan is Assistant Professor at the University of Alicante and is part of the Jordi Nadal Study Centre and the Institute of International Economics. She has been a visiting researcher at the University of York (UK) and at the University of Zaragoza. She obtained her PhD in the Economic History programme at the University Carlos III of Madrid and the University of Barcelona in 2019. She was awarded the Ramón Carande prize in 2019 and the Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship in 2020. In recent years she has published in Enterprise & Society, European Review of Economic History, Economic History Research and Industrial History Review among others. Her fields of research are monetary history, fiscal history and the fashion industry.