Apparel SWOT Strengths: Increased Strengths

Apparel SWOT

Strengths:

Increased strengths for the apparel industry in 2010 and beyond include the ability for fashion to be delivered with greater immediacy as well as changing marketing platforms, which interact in inextricable ways. Fashion is often at the mercy of individual tastes, and social marketing techniques -- generally web-based -- have led to an increase of communication between consumers and designers/manufacturers that leads to more specific designs and "humanized" brands (Arthur 2010). Customers can even work directly as designers, and Internet shopping and shipping has made a greater variety and volume of fashion available to a greater number of buyers (Corcoran & Lockwood 2010). While this will certainly increase competition within the apparel industry, it will serve to increase overall sales volume for the industry as a whole and so facilitate growth for successful companies.

Weaknesses:

The reduced timescale with which customers expect delivery and turnaround presents a significant disadvantage to certain members of the apparel industry. The artistic and craft aspects of apparel design and manufacture necessarily suffer when immediacy becomes the primary goal of the industry (Ford, in Foley 2010). The rapidity with which the public becomes inundated with and inured to new fashions can also hurt sales, potentially hurting the long-term reputation of certain houses and even of the industry as a whole (Ford, in Foley 2010). The increasing ease with which consumers can pick and choose from almost any designer and manufacturer in the world as well as effectively design their own clothing to be built using new media could also be disturbing to the morale of the craftspeople in the industry.

Opportunities:

The technological advantages cited above are the primary opportunity facing the apparel industry today. While creating the potential for lessened morale and quality of the products produce by the industry, these technological advancements also allow designers and manufacturers to reach much broader consumer bases than was previously possible, expanding market reach and enabling both ore fine-tuned marketing techniques as well as more consumer-influenced design processes (Arthur 2010). This industry shift has also created room for niche markets that have purposefully reverted back to older methods of conducting business, with an almost artificially slowed pace of production and availability creating a great deal of anticipation for quality clothing without a hint of consumer-collaborative design (Foley 2010).

Threats: