The Relationship between Customers’ Perception of Sustainable Supply Chain Practices and Purchasing Decisions: Lessons from H&M

In recent years, customers’ attention towards the environmental and social issues in fast-fashion retail supply chains has significantly increased, with the result that the majority of customers expect fashion retail organisations to improve their overall sustainability performance. The effective implementation of SSCM practises enables the promotion of human rights, fair labour conditions, environmental protection and anti-corruption policies in supply chains. As a consequence, many fashion retail companies now equally consider sustainability measures along with traditional SCM criteria such as cost, time and product quality. Nonetheless, the exact relationships between customers’ personal understanding and value perception of SSCM practises and their motivation to actually purchase sustainable fashion remain unclear. On the example of H&M, this study aims to fill the described research gap by investigating the relationships between customers’ perception of different SSCM practises at H&M and customers’ sustainable purchasing decisions. For this purpose, primary quantitative data is collected from 80 customers at the H&M Plymouth store and subsequently analysed by means of Spearman’s rank-order correlation analysis. Key findings show that factors such as customers’ perceived authenticity of H&M’s sustainable business values, customers’ perceived quality of H&M’s active and passive in-store communication, as well as customers’ perceived justifiability of increased prices for H&M’s sustainable fashion products are moderately positively related to customers’ willingness to purchase sustainable fashion at H&M. At the same time, factors like customers’ perceived sustainable benefit of H&M’s sustainability campaigns and customers’ perceived sustainable long-term benefit of paying higher prices for H&M’s sustainable fashion products are even strongly positively related to customers’ willingness to purchase sustainable fashion at H&M