Identifying factors and strategy influencing successful digital transformation in the fashion industry

In the recent business environment where the digital transformation makes a value across the industries, the fashion industry also witnessed a variety of business cases which leveraged cutting-edge ICT technologies to increase effectiveness of production and maximize customer experience. But, in the real world, vast majority of fashion companies had a trouble achieving successful digital transformation. In this background, this paper aims to identifying factors influencing successful digital transformation in fashion industry using AHP model. Furthermore, this study evaluate relative importance of two different implementation strategy for digital transformation: (1) Effectiveness of R&D and production (2) Maximizing customer experience. The pannel who answered AHP survey consist of experts in fashion industry and IT industry. As a result of empirical analysis, the most important factor influencing successful digital transformation of fashion industry was organizational culture at the 1st hierarchy of AHP model and the interest and support of TMT(Top Management Team) at the 2nd hierarchy of AHP model, respectively. Finally, in the evaluation of the priority of the implementation strategy, the strategy for maximizing customer experience was found to be slightly higher than the strategy for improving production efficiency. This paper contributes to both academia and practice. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt for quantitatively evaluating importance score of variety factors influencing digital transformation in fashion industry.