Exploring garment rental as a sustainable business model in the fashion industry: Does contamination impact the consumption experience?

摘要

Fashion has evolved into an unsustainable industry;fast fashion, which has a low-cost, high-volume focus is the dominant business strategy, resulting in vast resource use and environmental externalities. The purpose of this research is to support the transition to a more circular industry through exploring the opportunity for short-term garment rental as a part of a product-service shift. A number of consumer barriers exist to the adoption of novel business models. Included is the issue of contamination; literature suggests that an item may be consideredcontaminatedwhen another person or object interacts with it. This poses a fundamental conflict to the garment rental proposition. This study furthers understanding of contamination through a qualitative content analysis of 566 online reviews of two existing fashion rental providers. This enables insight into the actual customer experience, revealing a range of contamination incidences-most commonly visual and odour-related. The impact of a contamination event on the customer experience was overwhelmingly recorded as negative, at worst resulting in total rejection of the entire rental concept. The analysis suggests that contamination presents a psychological and practical obstacle to successful rental. A range of managerial implications were raised with corresponding recommendations offered to mitigate and reduce contamination across the value chain. The study highlights that trade-offs exist between product quality and commercial profitability. Findings suggest that rental is likely to be a challenging business model, raising the need for further academic and practitioner research to augment the findings.