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1. Introduction
Managing fashion products is challenging, not only for creative and stylists, but also for supply chain (SC) managers. Customers are more and more demanding high product variety and innovative products (Caniato et al., 2013), and competition in the fashion industry is more and more centred on the ability to react timely to changes in customers desires. Therefore, fashion companies have to balance the need to reduce lead times of the collections, while minimizing stocks and the obsolescence risk. In this context, being able to manage the SC, e.g., by achieving partnership between all the SC players, is becoming a strategic imperative in the fashion industry.
These represent highly ambitious objectives, given the key characteristics of the fashion product (Chrstopher et al., 2004): short life-cycles, high volatility (the demand for these products is rarely stable or linear), low predictability and high impulse purchasing.
To be able to cope with such challenges, fashion companies have to make the SC more flexible, by changing the way they manage their processes. Flexible SCs are able to adapt effectively to disruptions in supply and changes in demand whilst maintaining customer service levels (Stevenson and Spring, 2007). Moreover, increasing collaboration, both inside and among SC partners, is often seen as a powerful instrument in achieving effective and efficient SC management (de Leeuw and Fransoo, 2009), as well as higher SC agility (van Hoek et al., 2001).
Being replenishment the process that encompasses all the activities related to the fulfilment of stores during the selling season, it is the one key process to be managed to increase company ability to be closer to the customers and ready to the new emerging trends. Researchers have proposed different approaches to redesign and automate it (Iannone et al., 2013), e.g., identifying the variables influencing the replenishment process.
The paper presents a case study research conducted in a sample of Italian luxury fashion companies with the aim to study the replenishment process in the fashion luxury industry, and how they coordinate with the other partners of their SCs to be more effective and demand driven.
Many classifications concerning the fashion industry exist in literature. Saviolo and Testa (2005) distinguish five market segments basing on price and quality of the products:...