Brun, A., Lideo, C. "Quality Management in the Italian Luxury Industry: an empirical investigation on Cashmere" proceedings of "3rd International Workshop on Luxury Retail, Operations and Supply Chain Management"

In recent years the worldwide interest in luxury significantly increased, following the exceptional growth experienced by luxury industry: worldwide luxury goods market revenues are growing as much as 50% faster than global GDP, and arguably – according to the latest estimates – they will soon break the €1 Trillion sales threshold (Brun and Castelli, 2013; Altagamma Consensus, 2014). Meanwhile, this market is becoming more and more complex, requiring to adopt always new strategies and methodologies in order to keep up with the challenging demand of product and service excellence. Despite the notable amount of studies on this topic, the current literature on luxury industry is mainly focused on sociological, branding and marketing aspects. Among the typical “Critical Success Factors” (CSFs) in luxury, premium quality is definitely one of the most important, yet least analyzed in current literature. In fact, although the concept of “quality” and “quality management” (QM) have been deeply studied in recent years, few authors explicitly addressed these topics with regard to luxury industry as a whole, let alone the idiosyncrasies of Italian approach to luxury. In choosing to focus the research on Italy, cashmere was found to be one of the symbols of Italian excellence. Moreover, cashmere is still worldwide synonymous with luxury. Based on 9 cases of Italian cashmere luxury textile-fashion companies, the present empirical and explorative study has been realized with the twofold goal of (1) describing quality management organization, system and practices of Italian textile-fashion luxury firms working in the cashmere sector, and (2) understanding the significant impact of contingent factors on those variables. Results show that a common QM organizational structure is not adopted, however a high hierarchical status is usually ensured to QM managers. Moreover, companies showed a generally high commitment to quality. Meanwhile, a general resistance toward formalization and standardization appeared. Along the Supply Chain, suppliers seem involved in quality issues mainly through long-term and high trust relationships, generally managed in an informal way. The focus on customer is increasing. Finally, the contingent factors with the highest relevance in our analysis were company size and the level of luxury positioning.