The Lifestyle Industry: Its Sophisticated and Long Supply Chain Structure

The lifestyle industry today is the heart of Supply Chain evolution. Many fashion and apparel brands have been forced to adapt their strategies and processes to cover international demand of those raising economies with an extremely accelerated growth in the industry, such as; India, China and Asia Pacific in general.

This creates great growth opportunities for the industry. However, it represents a violent and desperate race to achieve the expansion and consolidation of these markets as quickly as possible.

It also represents a great challenge for each company; how to adapt the supply chain and how to balance its growth with the efficiency of the processes.

The need to grow through Supply Chain development

The need for continuous learning arises by looking at how to adapt to the changing global environment, how to penetrate the most important markets innovatively and how to efficiently cover each one of the newest trends.

Thanks to this need for growth, brands began to source their production from different countries to be able to reach the different markets faster with the best production cost and the best possible quality.

2nd, 3rd & 4th party logistics:

Fulfilling this need for growth and development implies that you need to actively add different party logistics. They provide experience, infrastructure and local resources for each specific market and help in consolidating such a complex and sophisticated Supply chain structure that today points to the fast fashion industry as a pioneer in the development of the supply chain.

By including more players to the equation, the operation increases its value in several aspects, for example:

• Better results in the market
• Greater investment in technology
• Much greater reach
• Lower risk to the brand

All the benefits provided by third parties come together with a fragmentation of the operation and eventually the lack of visibility of the brand throughout the entire journey.

The fragmentation of the operation has some consequences. Actually, the brand does not reduce the risk of delays. For example, this risk is only divided into more players and most importantly communication could be affected: “the more participants intervene, the more complicated and inefficient it becomes”.

Additionally, some operational inefficiencies might appear. The lack of visibility forced the brands to have an inventory excess in all stages, to ensure production continuity and avoid stock shortage in stores and shelves.

Integration as a pillar for growth

Therefore, brands are recommended to integrate their supply chain within their businesses to achieve traceability and visibility throughout the whole process. This integration often implies a huge investment to develop the technology, the infrastructure and the process needed to cover an end-to-end journey.

Consequently, constant supply chain interruptions might appear and therefore a lack of capability to innovate in different aspects of the business. But in the assumption of the achievement of the integration, it will provide the brand a competitive advantage, based on:

• Flexibility to adapt the speed of the supply chain
• Speed in operation and the last mile to deliver to end-user
• Visibility throughout the process
• Sustainable development along the entire route

Maersk and integration

In addition to having the most powerful and effective infrastructure in Latin America and in the world, Maersk has developed the technology to be able to integrate the added value that 2, 3, and 4 PL provide in a single process and with this consolidate itself as one of the first integrators of Supply chain in the world.

"5 key points to transform your logistic"

• Using a single platform to integrate the information.
• Flexibility as a competitive advantage.
• Agility to predict consumer tendencies and adapt your inventory accordingly.
• End-to-end traceability.
• Sustainable integration.