FMAD 1110: Fashion Fundamentals Textbook: 2.2 Fashion Life Cycle

Fashion Life Cycle

• Fashion Life Cycle: Customers with buying power through sales influence fashion trends. A fashion product is introduced to customers in the introduction phase bought by innovators and if it does well, the product will continue to be bought up by customers. As sales increase due to consumer purchases, the product may go through the rise phase bought by early adopter consumers, and then emerge into the culmination stages by accelerating to arrive at mass acceptance bought by early majority consumers. Once the market is saturated and the majority of customers own the fashion product, then the item will decline being purchased by only a few late majority since most consumers already have this fashion product. Eventually, the product go into an obsolescence phase bought by the customer group known as laggards since they are the last to get the fashion product before it goes completely out of style. Think of the fashion cycle similar to a human life (birth, growth, maturity, adult, elderly, and eventually death). Below you will see a technology adoption life cycle that resembles the fashion life cycle. Use the graph below to distinguish between each unique phase of customers' adoptions of a fashion product (such as an apple watch).

Thinking Point: Can you name a product that is in the decline stage (bought by late majority or even laggards) of the fashion cycle? Why did you identify this product as in this stage rather than another stage?

Image Source: Technology-Adoption-Lifecycle.png

The Fashion Life Cycle can go through various cycle lengths. For instance, a product can gain popularity, then slows down in popularity and picks up in popularity once again (see graph #1 below for a representation of this). Also, a product can gain momentum gradually over time and then gradually decline in popularity (see graph #2 for an example of this) or a product can have rapid popularity that quickly declines (see graph #3 that represents this). A fads gains a lot of brief acceptance by consumers through purchase as well as use of a fashion product but this quickly fades (like the sparkler concept we discussed earlier). Thus, you can see below that a fad has the thinnest tallest peak (see graph #3 below) of the graphs below. Flops on the other hand, gain very little acceptance early on so they phase out quickly (having a thin short peak-think of graph #3 but with not as tall of a peak). Conversely, staples are fashion items that don't go out of fashion as they are considered a wardrobe necessity.

Image Source: Product life cycle (3 charts) -2 NT.PNG