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Fashion Management Studio
Fashion is an interesting research field, from a management as well as from a sustainability perspective. Fashion management research is a rather new field as fashion research traditionally has sociological or cultural perspectives. Fashion management is developing into a field of research that addresses issues of management relevant for the fashion industry as well as sustainability and corporate social responsibility issues. The fashion retail sector in Sweden employs 30.000 people but we also have to add people in fashion related sectors, for example transportation, newspapers and advertising. Fashion is thus a sector of interest for research from a management perspective.
Despite its many positive connotations, the fashion industry is also criticized for causing ethical and environmental problems globally. Stream of reports show miserable working conditions in the manufacturing process; environment suffers from dangerous chemical processes; animals are abused and exploited and consumers’ consumption cause mountains of rubbish etc. Fashion is thus an interesting sector for research, both from a management and from a sustainable perspective.
Exciting Research for All Parties
“The objective is to produce exciting research of interest to both the business sphere and the educational sphere, while developing an attractive environment for researchers at the University of Borås,” says Professor Lisbeth Svengren Holm, director of Fashion Market Studio.
In her role as a director she above all wants to create conditions for people to develop their projects and cooperate with others, preferably across disciplinary lines, in order to create dynamic interplay between various skill sets. She thinks it is a good thing that several schools at the university are part of F3.
Major challenges for the textile and fashion industry are problems related to environment and resources. Those challenges are therefore focused on in many of the projects that have been formulated in the Fashion Market Studio. One of the programs focusing on environmental issues is The Design of Prosperity: Fabrics of the Future, supervised by Professor Simonetta Carbonaro, aided by PhD student David Goldsmith.
Another project, Sustainable Fashion as a Driver for New Business Models, is looking for a PhD student. The project focuses on how companies can create new consumer behavior when it comes to fashion.
Environmental Issues in Fashion
“Consumers in general are not interested in environment when it comes to fashion. That makes research about how companies can create new consumer behavior in fashion interesting,” says Professor Lisbeth Svengren Holm.
Another challenge is the globalization of the market and how companies deal with knowledge. Patrick Aspers does research about how knowledge is transmitted between the brand name owners’ design process and the suppliers on the production side – and how to protect that knowledge.
“Fashion management is a new field, and the studio hosts several initiatives for projects, formulated by senior researchers and PhD students, where we are looking for external research means,” says Lisbeth Svengren Holm.
Facts about Lisbeth Svengren Holm
Lisbeth Svengren Holm wrote her dissertation in business in 1995, and has been researching design management, specifically the integration of design in a company’s strategic operations, conditions for design to be used as a resource for strategic development; which in this case means strengthening innovative abilities and simultaneously communicating it to the market. That means integration of the methods and thinking from the design process into product development as well as market communication.
The interaction between disciplines, e.g. technical, economical (especially marketing) and design disciplines has been of special interest, along with how management at a company creates conditions for interplay rather than territorial thinking. Lisbeth Svengren Holm used to work at the University of Stockholm, School of Business, conducting projects where marketing students at the university cooperated with students from the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Between 2007 and 2009 she was the head of SVID, The Foundation for Swedish Industrial Design, research section.