The high end fashion industry: The Indian context

Abstract

With the aim of understanding the High-End Luxury Fashion Apparel Industry in India and channelizing the insights garnered and learning established towards creating strategic frameworks and application oriented outlays for budding fashion designers as well as existing fashion designers, this research was undertaken. To meet the research objective a thorough comparative analysis of the Indian Luxury apparel industry was done in comparison with the Western Luxury Apparel Industry. Effort was made to shortlist three fashion designers from the Indian context to understand their careers and learning from their life in the fashion world and to garner insights from them so as to help reach the objective of creating guiding frameworks and outlays for budding fashion designers. After thorough analysis of the Indian Luxury Apparel Industry the three designers which were selected were Manish Malhotra, Ritu Beri and Rajesh Pratap Singh. An in-depth analysis was carried on for understanding and extracting insights from the life of these three designers. Effort was also made towards getting insights from primary research using tools which included questionnaires, depth interviews, telephonic interviews and personal interviews. Secondary research was carried on using modes which included Journal papers, reference books and online web sources. Interesting and unexplored facets were found out about Luxury apparel industry in India and which included key learning in terms of the consumer psyche, the consumer attitudes, the brand power and brand building methods, the product-the design apparels, the considerations while doing extensions and the industry and how it works. Insights including aspects about the consumer body types which should be targeted, the impact of counterfeit design on the brands, the factors of motivation of opinion leaders and fashion innovators and the role of endorsers in this domain among other key aspects were amassed. Apart from these a theoretical perspective was also vouched for by applying key marketing, branding and consumer behavior frameworks on the Luxury Apparel Industry. Thus from the study undertaken herein, focus was established on the functionality of the luxury apparel industry in India and the insights collected were used for reaching towards the objective. Followed are the recommendations and improvement guidelines for ensuring the attainment of the objective mentioned. The results generated based on the synthesis and analysis carried on included detailed analysis of the market segmentation of consumers, the strategies needed to be adopted by fashion designers, the impact of reference groups and a dos and don’ts list. Attempt has also been made to propose suitable strategies and/or guidelines by creating a Luxury Apparel Framework along with two 2X2 matrices which give perspectives about the Shopping Motivations and Shopping Conditions in the industry.