Digital Avenues for Sustainable Clothing : A qualitative study exploring digitalization’s facilitating effects to improve clothing companies’ sustainability.

Abstract: Background: Digitalization and sustainability are two of the most impactful topics concerning businesses today which pose a nascent research field. Sustainability presents businesses with massive challenges in order to find new business models, improve processes, utilize resources more efficiently, and change their interactions with suppliers and other stakeholders. Simultaneously, digitalization is often characterized by its disruptive nature and the ways in which it creates new avenues for creating and capturing value and changes relationships. Furthermore, there are few industries in need of new ways to become more sustainable than the clothing industry.   Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the facilitating opportunities that digitalization presents for the clothing industry to achieve sustainability goals. The findings of this study are expected to contribute beneficial knowledge and concrete examples that managers, decision-makers, and IT personnel can use to better understand the existing prospects that digital transformation poses for their various sustainability goals.    Method: A qualitative design has been employed to perform this study. Five semi-structured interviews were conducted with various individuals representing Swedish clothing brands. An inductive approach was utilized alongside a grounded theory design.   Conclusion: The results show that there are many opportunities for digitalization to facilitate clothing companies’ sustainability goals. This comes in the form of enabling effects with their downstream suppliers through: improved environmental traceability, shifting supplier relationships, and improving working condition transparency. Moreover, upstream effects are observed in adaptions to new business models and relationship improvements with consumers. Finally, within the firm, improving processes and shifting capability requirements are changing the way that firms operate, and the knowledge sets needed to function. These findings were developed into a framework presented on page 40.