Reshoring: the influences on decision making process for fashion retailer

Blog 2/3

Since I posted my last blog, it has been three weeks now. I explored the area of my individual field study and felt it’s the time to share some of my progress with you. As mentioned in my first blog, I am doing the literature review so at first I selected some peer reviewed papers from search engine Primo and Google scholar. All of them are from the publishers for which university subscribe to Emerald, Springer, and Elsevier. Besides, I explored the topic “Reshoring” on a well established website of the textile industry. I found quite a good number of papers from the authors of different parts of the world. The most efficient way of literature search is to use keywords in the database. I use “Reshoring AND Textile” as the main keyword to find the relevant literature.

The textile industry has experienced an extensive move of offshoring due to globalization and economic trends that creates a fragmented and complex global supply chain, lots of supply related issues including many direct effects to sustainability, flexibility, controllability. Low labour and raw material cost of developing countries work as an influence to move the facilities, though now it creates the opportunity to move the production facility back to home country by reinvesting the total cost of ownership (TCO) related with the products. Thus reshoring is defined as the reversion of a previously offshoring decision, thereby ‘bringing manufacturing back home’. Previous choices of placing production in developing countries has now changed the focus as the visible and hidden cost come into consideration. Transportation cost to long distance, communication cost, handling cost, long time inventory carrying cost, asymmetric information flow all these made the choice of offshoring less attractive and encouraged retailers to move the production to reshore locations. Also, consumers are now much concerned and they intend to buy more eco friendly products believing it poses a traceable supply chain in its manufacturing process and has less impact on the environment. I am exploring the different aspects of reshoring and its effects on the overall supply chain that make it more visible and sustainable.

For the last couple of days, I abstract myself from the ongoing concern of Covid 19 and concentrate mainly on my research. I find some really good insight of reshoring and summerize all my findings in the final report. I am planning to submit the report by the end of this month and on a good track of following the report writing. I will share my findings in details on my next blog. Till then everyone be safe.