Milan Fashion Week ended on Monday, September 26, making way for Paris Fashion Week, and New York Fashion Week was held before them. The common thread running through all these glittering days of fashion shows and events is the focus on a renewed responsibility to the planet (consider, for example, the CNMI Sustainable Fashion Awards 2022 ceremony held in Milan at La Scala Theater), which is clamoring for us to take better care of it.
Roncucci&Partners has written about near-shoring or reshoring before. This is a mode of outsourcing that involves transferring some business processes to a nearby country, especially in preference to a more distant one. This, of course, makes sure that you shorten procurement times, optimize logistics costs, provide greater control of operations and reduce regulatory issues, but at the expense (probably) of increased costs.
Nowadays, reshoring is also a much-discussed topic in the fashion industry, which has been experiencing sourcing difficulties for a year now. But unlike cases such as technology and automotive, where the situation is really dramatic, for the fashion system the primary need is to chase a trend of primary importance today: social responsibility and sustainability.
In fact, what is driving textile-clothing companies toward zero-kilometer solutions is not so much the exorbitant increase in transportation costs and the logistical difficulties given by longer delivery times for goods, but more an opportunity to consolidate their reputation in the environmental field.
Indeed, reshoring allows for optimal management of excess production. The more geographically distant the supply countries are, the more demand forecasting must be anticipated, inevitably leading to overproduction of goods and inefficient sales response.
So, the decision to repatriate some processes of the production chain allows not only to invest in one’s own country (and in our case we know well how much weight Made in Italy has), refilling those wonderful excellences that we have in Italy and Europe and that, at times, are in danger of disappearing, but also to shorten the value chain. A shorter, more compact supply chain provides increased flexibility and direct control over it, while also showing consumers a concrete commitment to environmental sustainability.
Valentina Gestri Paolucci
