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Fashion
This new report measures the transformation of the Swedish fashion industry
Highlighting the strong development of second-hand, digital fashion, innovation, circular business models, and diversity.
By JOHAN MAGNUSSON
14 Nov 2022

The first edition of the report series Fashion Transformation was released during Swedish Fashion Council’s two-day event A Stockholm [X]perience curated by SFC. It also discusses the importance of bigger investments, political support, and the fact that the industry actually wants to change.

— It’s a report about transformation in the fashion industry, Swedish Fashion Council CEO Jennie Rosén (pictured above) explains. In order to position Swedish fashion as a global leader in the fashion industry of the future, we must draw attention to the change that the industry is facing and measure the changes that are taking place. To know where we are going and how to get there, we must first know where we are — the report is a first step in that work. We can now see that the second-hand market [in Sweden] is rising faster than the regular market — in 2020, the second-hand market, for clothes only, was 3 billion Kronor (around 280 million Euro) in Sweden. We also see that digital fashion is rising a lot — today, more than 50% of all Europeans are gaming. We also know that we need to establish what the fashion industry actually is — and not only the Swedish industry but the whole fashion industry. And doing that, we need to look into new KPIs and start to measure that.

Fashion Transformation uses quantitative data and qualitative interviews with key players from the industry, such as McKinsey, Renewcell, Axel Johnson, The Fabricant, and Sellpy. Among other things, it highlights diversity as a business-critical factor and the effect of the financial difficulties that consumers are facing with growing inflation, high-interest rates, and lower purchasing power. These changes, within the transformation, are not temporary trends. Instead, the industry’s sustainability-driven transformation will shape the industry for a long time to come.

Jacob Wall, Executive Vice President Business Development, Axel Johnson in the report: Over time, I don’t think any actor can succeed if you don’t have a clear sustainability profile. What I see that I think is new in recent years is actually that venture capital companies are turning their investments in this direction — the money flows into sustainable funds and companies.

Jennie Rosén, who’s the target group for the report?

— It’s needed for politicians, COOs, and everyone else with an interest in the future of fashion. But of course, we’re particularly invested in creating a good collaboration between the industry and politics. What we’re seeing now is that the creatives are standing outside the politics, but we need to have them on the inside working together with us. So, how do we engage them and make them a part of this? The report is an important step. And, also, I don’t see the report as only being a Swedish initiative, but we’re aiming to create a worldwide report. We are already in dialogue with the European Fashion Alliance to do a report together with all the European fashion councils. So, we really hope that we can get the financing to do that because I believe that in the future, we need to measure all those things — the second-hand market, digital fashion, and so on. And we need to do it together.

The Fashion Transformation report, available here.