Blue Ocean Strategy in the Fashion Textiles Business

The notion of the Blue Ocean Strategy was first proposed and then promoted by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. This approach is in contrast with the traditional competition-based strategies, as it provides firms with new insights on how to change the competition scene – a competition with non-zero-sum games that follows a reconstructionist view of the market. Kim, Mauborgne, and their followers have used this approach to investigate several case studies. Nevertheless, fashion textile businesses have rarely followed such an approach, and therefore, previous scholars have seldom studied such cases. Thus, this chapter uses the central tenets of the Blue Ocean Strategy and investigates three successful cases in an emerging economy in terms of market focus, competition type, demand type, value-cost trade-off, strategic focus, and type of the game. The authors have used a multiple case study research design to reveal how these selected companies have benefited from following blue ocean strategies. The findings revealed that following blue ocean strategies have increased their profitability and affected their brand reputation as creative firms in their market. Also, the imitation barriers, including alignment, cognitive and organisational, brand, and economic and legal barriers created by these companies, are explored accordingly. Finally, the chapter concludes with some remarks for practitioners and policymakers and future research directions.