Building Product-Service Ecosystems
Building Product-Service Ecosystems refers to the strategic integration of a diverse array of interconnected products, services, and experiences that collectively create a comprehensive and personalized offering for users. It involves the alignment of physical products, digital platforms, services, and partnerships to deliver a seamless and cohesive user experience.
By curating a holistic ecosystem, fashion brands can enhance user satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement while differentiating themselves in a competitive market. Building product-service ecosystems involves the deliberate curation and orchestration of a wide range of interconnected elements, including tangible products, intangible services, digital platforms, and experiential touchpoints, to deliver a comprehensive and unified user experience. The goal is to create an ecosystem that goes beyond individual transactions and fosters long-term relationships with users
A product-service ecosystem encompasses not only the physical garments and accessories but also the associated services and experiences that surround them. This can include personalized styling advice, virtual try-on technologies, fit consultations, alterations, repair services, and fashion-related events or workshops. By combining these elements, fashion brands can offer a more holistic and tailored experience that resonates with their user’s needs and preferences.
Additionally, a key aspect of building product-service ecosystems is ensuring consistency and coherence across the entire range of products and services. This involves maintaining consistent sizing, quality standards, design aesthetics, and brand identity across various product categories. Consistency fosters trust and familiarity among users, enabling them to easily navigate and engage with the ecosystem.
Furthermore, building open ecosystems that allow interoperability with other brands, platforms, or technologies can create new opportunities and enhance the value proposition. Collaborations with complementary brands, partnerships with technology providers, or integration with third-party platforms enable fashion brands to expand their offerings and provide users with a more comprehensive and seamless experience.
For example, a fashion brand may partner with a footwear brand to offer coordinated collections, collaborate with a beauty brand to create makeup or fragrance lines or integrate with e-commerce marketplaces to reach a broader audience.
Building product-service ecosystems also necessitates leveraging technology and data to personalize and optimize the user experience. By harnessing user data, brands can offer personalized recommendations, targeted promotions, and customized services that align with individual preferences and purchasing behaviors. This level of personalization enhances user satisfaction and loyalty, driving repeat purchases and advocacy within the ecosystem.
Moreover, the development of product-service ecosystems requires collaboration and coordination across various internal and external stakeholders. It involves aligning departments such as design, production, marketing, sales, user service, and logistics to ensure a seamless user journey. This may require redefining roles and responsibilities, establishing clear communication channels, and implementing effective processes to enable efficient collaboration and decision-making.
Overall, building product-service ecosystems represents a paradigm shift from traditional transactional models to a more user-centric and experiential approach. It requires a deep understanding of user needs, effective coordination of resources, and the ability to leverage technology and partnerships to create a unified and differentiated offering. By embracing this approach, fashion brands can cultivate long-lasting relationships with users and drive sustainable growth in the dynamic fashion industry.
Case studies
Patagonia – Worn Wear & Repair Services
Patagonia’s Worn Wear ecosystem combines product design, repair services, resale, and storytelling into a single platform. Wearers can repair garments in-store or via mail-in, trade in used items, and buy refurbished products, creating an integrated product-service ecosystem that keeps products in use and tightens feedback between design, use, and aftercare.
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EILEEN FISHER – Renew & Waste No More
EILEEN FISHER Renew invites wearers to return used garments in exchange for credit; items are then cleaned, repaired, resold or transformed in the Waste No More studio. This creates a branded ecosystem spanning design, collection, remanufacturing, and resale, with dedicated physical spaces and digital channels that operationalize circular product-service relationships.
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Mud Jeans – Lease A Jeans Circular Ecosystem
Mud Jeans operates an ecosystem in which wearers can lease jeans, return them at end-of-use, and have the fibres mechanically recycled into new denim. The model links subscription-style access, repair, take-back, and fibre-to-fibre recycling, demonstrating how a tightly coupled product-service system can align revenue with material circularity.
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Levi Strauss & Co. – Levi’s SecondHand & Tailor Shops
Levi’s combines its SecondHand buy-back and resale platform with in-store Tailor Shops offering customization and repair. Together, these services extend garment lifetimes, create new touchpoints around care and modification, and link physical retail, digital resale, and craft services into a coherent product-service ecosystem around denim.
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Nudie Jeans – Repair, Reuse, Recycle Ecosystem
Nudie Jeans’ ecosystem integrates free lifetime repairs, reuse through resale of repaired jeans, and fibre recycling of unrepairable items. Repair shops, mobile repair events, and clear take-back channels form a service layer around the core denim products, aligning business value with prolonged use and circular material flows.
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References
Armstrong, C. M., & Lang, C. (2013). Sustainable product-service systems: The new frontier in apparel retailing? Research Journal of Textile and Apparel, 17(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1108/RJTA-17-1-2013-B001
Bocken, N. M. P., de Pauw, I., Bakker, C., & van der Grinten, B. (2016). Product design and business model strategies for a circular economy. Journal of Industrial and Production Engineering, 33(5), 308–320. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681015.2016.1172124
Geissdoerfer, M., Savaget, P., Bocken, N. M. P., & Hultink, E. J. (2017). The Circular Economy – A new sustainability paradigm? Journal of Cleaner Production, 143, 757–768. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.12.048
Lüdeke-Freund, F., Gold, S., & Bocken, N. M. P. (2019). A review and typology of circular economy business model patterns. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 23(1), 36–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.12763
Tukker, A. (2004). Eight types of product–service system: Eight ways to sustainability? Experiences from SusProNet. Business Strategy and the Environment, 13(4), 246–260. https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.414