Striding into fashion

It’s been a rough ride for the fashion industry through the pandemic, with a high level of disruption and change. Emma De Vita investigates how the sector is ripe for project management.

Striding into fashion September is a big month for fashion, with London, Milan, Paris and New York fashion weeks all happening. This year, London Fashion Week (LFW) will be a hybrid event, with a combination of “physical and digital activations”.

The LFW digital platform launched in June 2020 and is updated year‑round, allowing retailers, media and consumers to view and buy collections. Its creation is symbolic of the tumultuous 18 months fashion and retail have experienced. Fashion businesses, from luxury design houses and high‑street stalwarts to small, designer‑led firms, are contending with a huge amount of disruptive change: COVID‑19, digitisation, Brexit and sustainability concerns.

Project managers are change masters, and this, combined with the project‑based nature of fashion, means the industry, like many other creative industries, is starting to recognise the benefits that project managers can bring.

From the top

Kim Winser is the CEO of fashion brand Winser London and the former CEO of Aquascutum.

“Substantial change brings challenges and opportunities, and we have experienced plenty with the pandemic, Brexit, the rapid move to new routes to market – particularly online trading and new ways of communicating and engaging with customers with the progression of social media, digital marketing and content opportunities – plus the pace of change brought on by the world demanding a more sustainable style of operating,” she explains.

“So, there are plenty of opportunities for strong project managers to work with brands and businesses to develop more appropriate business models for the future.” Project management is underused by many fashion businesses, but with so much change, there is a real and tangible opportunity for it to make serious inroads. “In periods of substantial change, project managers can bring terrific experience, talent and objective thought, but as we know, ownership from the top down will help this be more constructive,” Winser says.

In large fashion businesses, project managers are a critical part of support functions like IT or capital projects, but historically project management has not been formally recognised on the creative side of things. What does Winser think the project profession can do to attain greater recognition within the fashion industry? “I think more coverage of what project managers can bring, the richness of their contribution and how they can work alongside existing teams would be beneficial. There can be the view that only the employed team understands the brand or business well enough, so some good examples would help. As with most things, more discussion, illustration and exposure.”

Golden opportunity Madeleine Marcella‑Hood is a lecturer in the school of creative and cultural business at Robert Gordon University (RGU), and was co‑author of a 2015 APM research paper entitled An Exploration of the Extent to which Project Management Can Be Applied across Creative Industries. The researchers found that most of the fashion managers they interviewed were unaware of formal project management tools and techniques, but recognised the value that these might bring. Project management in turn should adapt to the needs of the industry by understanding the fashion life cycle and the role of agile project management.

Marcella‑Hood explains that the pandemic has led to some negative impacts that may have been inevitable, like shop closures, with companies forced to react quickly to rethink designs and redistribute stock. Fashion events moved online or were scaled down. The pandemic has also raised awareness of key issues that have been coming to the fore over the past few years surrounding issues of ethics and sustainability in the sector, such as the environmental impact of the overproduction of clothing, the complex international supply chain – most evident in fast fashion – and factory working conditions.

“One of the terms I encounter a lot that I feel is perhaps most strongly linked to project management is the fashion life cycle. This has accelerated massively over the past couple of decades and this has meant that the industry has perhaps had greater control over influencing trends. However, what the pandemic has shown us is that external forces are strong and have the power to completely disrupt everything we think we know about a market – this is perhaps particularly the case with fashion, which could be regarded as a luxury rather than a necessity.”

Change makers

“These issues will require critical changes, particularly within larger organisations, and project management is an important way in which fashion organisations can plan and implement those changes. I’ve no doubt that is exactly what they are doing, even if they aren’t actually calling it that,” Marcella‑Hood says. “Project management is playing an increasingly critical role in the fashion industry, although it still isn’t a term that is used as broadly as within other industries, like construction and engineering.”

What’s more common, she explains, is the use of the word ‘project’. “Projects are a vital part of the fashion industry,” she says, explaining that because of the temporary nature of trends, project management lends itself well to the fashion industry, which relies on change. A project‑based organisational structure is common in fashion SMEs, and while larger companies are structured in a more conventional and functional manner, there are still projects that require teams to come together outside of business as usual, such as fashion weeks, campaigns, collaborations and the launch of new collections.

“Accidental project managers have been a more common feature of fashion, probably because fashion businesses are often SMEs, where a founder has become a project manager when launching and managing new designs and processes, marketing their products/garments and selling them,” says Marcella‑Hood. But, since the APM research was published in 2015, she finds there has been an increasing recognition of project management as a function within the fashion industry as part of a broader recognition of the business and management side of things.

An increase in appetite

Marcella‑Hood explains that: “Since we published our paper, we have seen an increase in fashion management and business courses being delivered at universities across the UK. ‘Projects’ in the fashion industry have become more visible and they are labelled as such. Fashion projects form a core part of our curriculum on the fashion management courses at RGU, where client‑led projects, research projects and sustainability projects are just some of the modules we offer that contain a project element.” She teaches her students about project management as part of a module on managing in the creative industries.

However, despite the growing appetite for project management techniques and tools, many of the challenges in implementing project management remain. “Fashion has creativity at its core, it is increasingly recognised as an art form and relies on creative individuals to design and bring designs to life through compelling marketing campaigns. The industry needs workers who can challenge convention and innovate to keep fashion alive. This is where the tension between left‑ and right‑brain thinking comes in,” Marcella‑Hood explains.

“Sheonagh [Rowley, co-author of the 2015 paper] and I argue that a combination of the two mindsets is desirable for successful project management within fashion. This balance is perhaps easier to obtain in larger organisations that can afford to employ a diverse team of individuals who possess these skills. It is perhaps more difficult in smaller organisations to achieve the balance between the creative and the analytical aspects.”

If project management is to succeed in making further inroads into the business of fashion, then flexible approaches must be championed. “Some of the tools and processes we would typically associate with project management are more applicable than others and therefore are more likely to be adopted within the industry. For example, it would be unrealistic to expect that a fashion business would conform to the more rigid long‑term planning and scheduling processes that might work for other sectors like construction. Planning is still needed and is incredibly important, but the process of doing so needs to be more flexible and open to change,” Marcella‑Hood advises.

Making fashion work better

Mairi Lowe is a content marketer and systems practitioner for Sustainable Fashion Scotland (SFS), which she helped found in 2020. SFS is a community‑led social venture that helps communities collaborate and contribute towards collective sustainability action. Edinburgh‑based Lowe oversees the project management of SFS, as well as working across online event organisation and facilitation, research and development planning, funding applications, creating partnerships with people and organisations working in fashion in Scotland, creating marketing materials, overseeing a small team of volunteers, and running biweekly meetings with its steering group/board.

A lot of moving parts

Lowe works closely with fashion SMEs in Scotland. “Fashion is so uncertain and it’s so complex,” she explains. “You are working with so many stakeholders across the supply chain. If you’re a brand creating products, you’re talking to suppliers and manufacturers. If you’re working with just one manufacturer, you might have five different people working on one garment. For creating the yarn, you might be talking to farmers if you’re a small business that wants to work local. That’s just the production side, and then you have all the marketing and the actual retail as well. And some of those people are international. There are a lot of different moving parts, so it’s hard to plan.”

The sector is ripe for project management, she thinks. “Small business owners are very overwhelmed and very stressed. There are things they have to leave to the side that they don’t have time for. “If you had the skills to oversee everything and know what’s going on, things wouldn’t fall through the gaps as much and you would feel calmer as well, and more capable of handling it all.”

Most people who work in fashion are creative, and it’s their main skill, but Lowe doesn’t think this mindset precludes project management capabilities. “You can be good at project management because you’re creative, because you have to be agile and you have to be open to opportunities that might happen. I think a lot of [people in fashion] are very capable but wouldn’t specifically say they were a project manager.” Surely it’s time for the profession to put its best (designer‑clad) foot forward to strengthen the ranks of accidental project managers in fashion and give the creative industries the greater professionalisation they need.