Sustainable Start-ups and Entrepreneurial Narratives: A Lexical Analysis of Dimensions Emerging from Crowdfunding Campaigns in the Fashion Industry

Crowdfunding represents an interesting and flexible tool for the provision of financial resources and digital visibility to support sustainable fashion projects. Literature has recently yielded some empirical evidence on the success factors of crowdfunding call for sustainable fashion entrepreneurs. In our study, we concentrate on a still unexplored perspective regarding how sustainable fashion projects communicate their business ideas and products to signal sustainability, quality and cultural dimension via crowdfunding platform. More specifically, using a lexical approach, we analyse the narrative sections (including videos’ texts) of the crowdfunding pitches posted by a selected sample of Italian sustainable fashion start-ups on Kickstarter platform from 2018 to 2022. Findings show the relevance of three core dimensions: sustainability-oriented product, Italian culture-oriented product design and customer-oriented product.