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Abstract:Incorporating sustainability into the supply chain is becoming a key priority for many textile and apparel companies. For example, H&M, Patagonia, and The North Face have incorporated various approaches to enhance their levels of sustainable supply chain management. Typical approaches include sustainable product strategy, sustainable investment, sustainable performance evaluation, corporate social responsibility, and environmental management system adoption, which contribute to the development of sustainable supply chain management in the textile and apparel industry. In this paper, we introduce the fifteen articles published in this special issue, and summarize the key findings and future research directions in the area of textile and apparel sustainable supply chain management.

The phenomenon of copycats is common in a wide range of industries. Recently, to indicate product authenticity and combat copycats, many brand name companies (BNCs) have started selling products through retailers. These BNCs deploy a scalable protocol that is integrated into a permissioned blockchain technology (PBT) platform. We examine how PBT combats copycats in the supply chain and how it benefits BNCs. Although PBT implementation helps novice customers identify product authenticity and the real quality of products, that is, to take advantage of a quality disclosure effect, we show that, if and only if the number of novice customers is large enough, then selling through a PBT retailer can effectively combat copycats. Thus, PBT increases the profit of the BNC, consumer surplus, social welfare, and reduces the profit of a copycat. Moreover, conventional wisdom tells us that PBT ensures supply chain transparency and motivates a firm to improve its product quality. However, the BNC reduces the quality of its products when using PBT, because an improvement in product quality is not profitable if consumers can distinguish between genuine and imitation products. Furthermore, we extend the model by considering the case where the BNC itself implements PBT. Without the double marginalization effect, even if the number of novice customers is small, blockchain technology may exist in the market (the BNC self‐implements). In addition, if the unit production cost of a genuine product is large enough, social welfare increases when production cost increases.

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Fashion supply chain members now search for trade-offs between sustainable investment and the related incentives, such as savings on environmental taxes and gains in incremental demands. To evaluate the economic and environmental performance of sustainable investment from a power perspective, we develop an analytical model to study a two-echelon sustainable supply chain consisting of one retailer and one manufacturer with three different power structures. We derive the optimal solutions for various cases associated with different supply chain power structures and sustainable investors. Though it is beneficial for both the manufacturer and retailer to make sustainable investment, they often utilize high power to gain economic benefit with less sustainable investment. Interestingly, the follower with less supply chain power has more incentive to make a sustainable effort to achieve a higher profit. The optimal amount of sustainable investment in the apparel manufacturer investment case is greater than that in the retailer investment case in most scenarios.