Up-thrust in turbulence waters : innovative practices in fashion designer entrepreneurship

Fashion designer entrepreneurship in Sri Lanka has developed at a significant rate within the last decade. As in any other business, designer entrepreneurs have faced many challenges in today’s turbulent business environment. This paper focuses on critical challenges induced by turbulent business environment and fashion designer entrepreneurs’ innovative management practices to overcome those challenges. Through qualitative method of in-depth interviews, six participants shared their experiences and perspectives on critical turbulence factors and strategies they have implemented to overcome those challenges that have contributed to their business success. Analysis consisted of a coding system to generate similar themes and categories supported by SQR Nvivo 07 software. Findings revealed seven critical factors related to the environment turbulence as perceived by the participants and seven distinctive strategies implemented by the participants in response to those turbulence factors. The seven strategies can be broadly categorised under ‘Product/Market Innovation Strategies’ and ‘Relationship and People Strategies’. This paper contributes to the creative industries sector in Sri Lanka, and particularly to the fashion designer entrepreneurship in terms of identifying strategies that can be implemented by the entrepreneurs and policy makers in response to unfavourable and turbulent environments. Data collected in this study were restricted to the fashion designer entrepreneurship. However, the same combination of management practices and strategies would be contributing to other entrepreneurship sectors, and therefore further exploration of this study is encouraged