Moving towards circular economy in the fashion industry: a systematic review of New Product Development and Supply Chain Management practices

Today’s current focus on mass production and consumption resulted in extreme human influence on natural processes. Circular economy (CE) emerges to be an alternative and promising paradigm, focusing on disruptive innovation, greener industrial capacities and policy interventions. However, inefficiencies in supply management, globally dispersed production networks and high utilization rate of finite resources impede such systemic changes to transform today’s linear industrial settings. Personal goods, such as apparel, leather goods and consumer electronics, are pivotal to explore the extent to which environmental as well as social footprint could be mitigated through CE adoption. Putting CE into practice, developing new products while adopting CE principles requires an unique orchestration of supply chain stages. That is, the combination of the New Product Development (NPD) and the Supply Chain Management (SCM) perspective on CE is fundamental for a successful creation of regenerative flows. Focusing on one of the most-polluting and natural resource dependent industries, this study explores the fashion industry by responding to existing knowledge gaps. The paper aims to answer two research questions: i) what practices are adopted to support designers and supply chain actors to develop new products and manage the flows for CE; ii) what capabilities in the NPD and SCM processes are needed to accelerate this transition. Adopting a systematic review on peer-reviewed papers on Scopus database, we analyzed 38 publications to investigate the extent to which CE is adopted in the fashion industry. This allows to close the circle between NPD and SCM processes and to provide scientific and practical contributions to inspire linear industrial settings to move towards CE.