Ultra-Fresh Fashion and Sustainability

The emergence of ultra-fast fashion companies has created great interest in companies pursuing supply chain agility. The leaders among such companies, such as Shein and Temu, utilized their extremely agile supply chain to design and generate new products fast and frequently, capturing the latent demands of customers. The authors of this chapter have labeled their strategies as “ultra-fresh fashion.” While such companies have achieved great business success in the market, they have also been under scrutiny on the sustainability impacts of their ultra-fresh strategies. In this chapter we explore the sustainability challenges of ultra-fresh fashion business and discuss potential measures that can improve its sustainability. To gain concrete insights, we develop a simplified analytical model that captures the quantitative impacts on the multiple dimensions of sustainability, and derive qualitative insights.