The Potential Of The Sharing Economy In The Fashion Industry

Over the past few decades,Uber became the world's largest taxi company without owning any vehicle,Facebook,the world's most popular media owner without creating any content and Airbnb,that owns no real estate,is now the world's largest accommodation provider.Collaborative consumption is getting more and more popular globally,generating revenues of nearly 4 billion euros in Europe in 2015 according to a Pw C study.Also called the “sharing economy”,this new paradigm is based on peer-to-peer sharing of access to goods and services generally through Internet.Many academics and managers see it as an alternative of our capitalist system based on inequality,over-production and over-consumption leading to serious social and environmental problems.As one of the market leaders in the fashion industry,it appears interesting to analyze and understand the potential of the sharing economy in the fashion industry in France.This thesis is one of the first attempts to examine the French consumer behavior in the context of fashion sharing activities.Thus,the aim of this research is to investigate the factors influencing French consumers to participate in this new economy.This study is based on a quantitative study following the theory of planned behaviour of Ajzen(1991).Data collected through an online questionnaire demonstrate that attitudes,subjective norms and perceived behavioral control can influence the intentions of French consumers to change their way of consuming clothing and accessories.However,this study is limited to the analysis of the French consumer behavior on online fashion sharing platforms,and because of time and cost the survey was spread only to a small group of French consumers living in the area of Nantes.In that case,it might be wrong to generalize the findings to the entire French market or even to other countries.Furthermore,there is no deep analysis of these new business models appearing and this work doesn't cover the collaborative production within the fashion industry on the supplier side that could be a topic for further research.