QUALITY CONTROL IN LUXURY FASHION INDUSTRY

What is quality control?

Quality control (QC) is a procedure or set of procedures intended to ensure that a manufactured product or performed service adheres to a defined set of quality criteria or meets the requirements of the client or customer.

QUALITY MEASURES:

Although product quality may be described by a set of 1. physical, 2. chemical, 3. comfort, 4. environmental etc. properties that can be established by appropriate laboratory tests, not all features (e.g. workmanship) can be expressed in numerical values.

QUALITY COMPONENTS:
The quality of industrial products has several components playing different roles in appreciating its value, namely: Quality of the construction or structure Functional quality Production/execution quality Realization/recognition quality

COMPARISON BETWEEN BRANDS

LEVI STRAUSS VS LEE ZARA VS H&M

LEVIS HISTORY

The Levis was founded in 1875 and produced jeans for youth from denim which is a coarse, heavy twill fabric. During the 1980s the company branched out into a range of garments including suits. In the 1990s the association with the youth culture began to lose some of its vitality. In early 2000s levis was relaunched with a new brand mission i.e to be the coolest and most profitable jeans brand.

LEVIS QUALITY CONTROL

Levis is a well-known organization and they enjoyed great triumphs in the last century, especially from the 1960s to mid 1990s. Levis lacked innovation and stuck to what they knew, which morphed into offering few product lines that also were out of style. By not being up-to-date, Levis lost sales when they missed and failed to forecast trends in The 1990s. As new rivals entered the market, consumers could choose from designer jeans to more affordable jeans at retail stores.

Brand Revival

Strategic alliances and licensing. By collaborating with other companies in other industries, Levis could enter new product categories and expand beyong clothes. Fast Fashion. By speeding up design processes Levis could create the absolute latest in fashion trends, which translates into loyal and happier customers. Customization. Now that Levis is doing better, the Personal Pair program could be relaunched and would probably be very successful in an era where customers (are looking for more individuality from their clothing purchases.

LEE HISTORY

The company was formed in 1889 by Henry David Lee as the Lee Mercantile Company at Salina Kansas producing dungarees and jackets. The growth of Lee was prompted by the introduction of the Union-All work jumpsuit in 1913 and their first overall in 1920. Later in the 1920s Lee introduced a zipper fly and continued to expand.

LEE QUALITY CONTROL

Lee starts making overalls of high quality in 1911. The first one was called the Bib Overall and was originally made in 8oz denim and had a multifunction pocket and a button fly. In 1922 The H.D. Lee Company created Buddy Lee as an advertising piece. Always first to market with the latest innovation in denim, Lee released stretch denim into the Australian market in 1980s - within 18 months, the trend for stretch denim had sky rocketed establishing Lees reputation as the latest denim trends

Brand Revival

Strategic alliances and licensing-The Lee Jeans today is manufactured by Arvind Mills limited, where the brand gains a lot of cost advantage with its competition as the raw materials are cheap in India. Fast Fashion-Dedicated design teams in Australia creating designs for the Australian and New Zealand markets with a continued focus on bringing the latest denim trends to the fashion forward market in 2013 Customization- Now Lee continues to push boundaries and collaborate with creative minds to deliver cutting edge ideas.

ZARA

Zara is a Spanish clothing and accessories retailer based in Arteixo, Galicia, and founded in 1975 by Amancio Ortega and Rosala Mera. It is claimed that Zara needs just two weeks to develop a new product and get it to stores, compared to the six-month industry average, and launches around 10,000 new designs each year. Zara has resisted the industry-wide trend towards transferring fast fashion production to low-cost countries. Perhaps its most unusual strategy was its policy of zero advertising; the company preferred to invest a percentage of revenues in opening new stores instead.

H&M

H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB (H&M) is a Swedish multinational retail-clothing company, known for its fast-fashion clothing for men, women, teenagers and children. The branding consultancy Interbrand ranked the company as the twenty-first most-valuable global brand in 2009 and 2010,making it the highest-ranked retailer in the survey. Its worth is estimated at $1216 billion.

Brand Failure Zara And H&M

Clothes sold by Zara, from Spain, failed in three categories, the most of any brand tested. It is also the only brand that has failed three successive quality tests. Tests covered such characteristics as fiber content, color fastness and pH value. (A high pH, meaning the fabric contains alkaline, can irritate the skin.) Zara's down coats failed BCA's quality tests in 2009 and 2010; their actual down content was lower (by 9.1 and 18.5 percent, respectively) than what the labels said.

Contd..

Forty three batches of clothing failed in the city's latest quality tests, according to local industrial and commercial bureau . The bureau found 11 batches, including clothing from the brand H&M, to be substandard due to poor fabric quality. It is not the first time that quality problems have been found in H&M clothing. Besides fabric problems, other clothing brands failed tests for pH balance, color fastness, fiber content and some suffered from partial non-standard product labels.

Brand revival strategy for H&M

In the coming months, H&M is launching a denim collection made with cloth recycled from used garments returned to its stores and also a new "Conscious" range using bamboo, recycled polyester and organic cotton. H&M has pledged to use only cotton from sustainable sources by 2020 and to phase out the use of toxic chemicals that environmentalists say can pollute rivers near factories. Using celebrities like David Beckham to endorse their products.

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