Sustainable Operations for Fashion Manufacturing: A Dynamic Time-Varying Framework

The highly pollution-intensive fashion industry requires manufacturers to do substantial sustainable practices over time. Concurrently, customers’ environmental awareness challenges manufacturers to balance sustainability efforts with profitability and meet customers’ evolving inclinations. Prior literature has primarily considered customers’ preferences for ecofriendly fashion without examining the feedback between time-varying customers’ valuation and manufacturers’ sustainability. The recognized challenges and research deficiencies motivate us to incorporate feedback mechanisms in sustainable fashion manufacturing management. Moreover, in this article, we explore how consumerism influences manufacturers’ sustainable fashion over time and simultaneously analyze sustainability effects on customers’ valuation of fashion products. The innovative framework introduced in this study for tackling sustainable operations uses a dynamic game theory modeling to explore the complex interactions and feedback loops between customers’ valuation trends and fashion manufacturers’ evolving sustainability efforts over time. The contributions of our study to sustainable fashion business studies are as follows: analytically modeling the dynamic interplay between customers’ valuation and sustainability as two critical states of the fashion system, incorporating separate decision variables for product-focused and process-focused sustainability; analyzing how consumerism and demand patterns impact sustainability and customer perceptions; and determining optimal time-varying allocation between product versus process sustainability investments to maximize profitability under shifting preferences. We view sustainability both as a continuous process and a measurable outcome. Findings suggest that investing in sustainability benefits fashion brands when customers change styles slowly and companies focus on durable products. Moreover, this study generates managerial insights on the implications of time-varying sustainability for fashion industry stakeholders, decision makers, and researchers.