Optimal Pricing Decision of Fashion Apparel considering Experiential Service and Design Enhancement

Fashionable clothing is susceptible to seasonality, fashion popularity, and other factors. The decline in the fashion level for fashion apparel will cause its market value to continuously decrease, reducing market demand and creating a backlog of apparel inventory. Under such a circumstance, the apparel retailer chooses to maintain the fashion of the goods by providing experiential services or enhancing product design capabilities. This paper focuses on the discussions on the issue of whether experience service and design efforts are complements or substitutes. The major objective is to simultaneously determine the experience service investment and the optimal selling price to maximize the total profit. First, a Cobb–Douglas utility function is used to derive a demand function that depends on the price and fashion level. Four kinds of inventory models are further established to obtain optimal pricing and inventory ordering strategies. Second, an algorithm is presented to search for the optimal solutions of the proposed model. Finally, a numerical example is provided to perform a sensitivity analysis of the key parameters and to discuss specific managerial insights. The numerical examples show that both the experiential services and the enhanced fashion design can effectively reduce the apparel company’s inventory and increase profits. When the two strategies are combined, they will produce complementary or substitution effects, which depend on the deterioration rate of the fashion level of the apparel. If the deterioration rate is less than a critical value, the interaction of experiential services and design investment has a complementarity effect.