Identifying the supply chain disruptions, risks and mitigation strategies of fashion retailers due to the Covid-19 pandemic: A case study of H&M

Abstract

With the rapid development and advancement of the fashion industry as well as the increasing popularity of fast fashion, fashion retailers have had to continually work towards improving their supply chain and keep up with unexpected changes in consumer demands. However, this also made way for negative effects and disruptions in the fashion supply chain. Common disruptions and strategies to mitigate them have been studied in the past. But with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, it called for newer strategies to be studied and implemented to bring improvement in the working of the supply chains, which has not been an easy task for fashion retailers and has resulted to be quite time consuming as well. This study aims to bring together existing literature on the risks, disruptions and mitigation strategies that have been used in the fashion industry before the Covid-19 pandemic and combine it with a qualitative case study of the fashion giant, H&M, to analyse how the company has worked at solving the unexpected disruptions. The study consists of primary information by means of interview and secondary information from books, journals and the company website. The results and contribution have shown that part of strategies explained by literature are adopted by the case company, although other strategies were considered with less intensity, giving space for the company to develop its own strategies based on events and experiences from the past.