Manufacturing reshoring in the fashion industry: A literature review

Manufacturing reshoring is the decision to relocate to the home country production activities earlier offshored (independently of the implemented governance mode, in- vs. out-sourcing). This topic has attracted the attention of practitioners and policy makers; in recent decades the attention of scholars has also grown quite rapidly. Following the suggestions of earlier scholars, this paper adopts an industry-level perspective, focusing its attention on the fashion industry, since its characteristics may heavily influence the manufacturing reshoring decisions. This article aims to present and discuss the results of a systematic literature review on relocation decisions implemented by fashion companies. More specifically the authors analysed 17 articles indexed on Elsevier Scopus and published up to December 2018. Based on collected evidence, a comparison with findings that emerged in previous reviews regarding the whole reshoring extant literature is performed, and the specificities of the fashion industry are shown and discussed. Avenues for further research for this specific industry are then presented and discussed.