Harrington Collection: Sizing Up the Active-Wear Market

1. What is your evaluation of the women’s apparel industry?
The women’s apparel industry was both mature and highly competitive in 2007. Because of the slow economic recovery consumers had become high price sensitivity and they were shifting towards less expensive apparel products which created a pressure to keep the price low. As a result of this many industries began outsourcing production overseas because of the low production cost. In 2007 they showed sales of 133billion and about 4.2% increase compared to previous year.
They classified the apparel product in to six category based on the quality and price where, “Haute couture” was a high end clothing and cost could be more than 10,000 dollars and “ budget” was the less expensive product which produced casual clothing which coasted around a price of less than 50 dollars. The rest categories will lie between this price range and this shows the price different in apparel industry between the low and the high product clothing. The challenges faced in this apparel industry were their product life cycle. They had a short product life cycle which was due to consumer taste changes rapidly so they should frequently change their designs accordingly to match their taste. So the manufacturers were struggling to match up with the short product life cycle of the product.
How the average price of women’s apparel changed?
Even after the economic downturn, the U.S market in the apparel industry was able to show both mature and highly competitive market. We could see a continuous growth in the units sold from the exhibit2 tabulation. The retail sales in 2002 were 106 billion which increased to 133 billion in 2007 which shows an average growth rate of 4.7%. This tells us that the industrial growth is constantly increasing. As the consumer becomes price sensitive