Supply Chain Contracts in Fashion Department Stores: Coordination and Risk Analysis

In the fashion industry, department stores normally trade with suppliers of national brands by markdown contract whilst developing private labels with cooperated designers by profit sharing contract. Motivated by this real industrial practice, we study a single-supplier single-retailer two-echelon fashion supply chain selling a short-life fashion product of either a national brand or a private label. The supplier refers to the national/designer brand owner and the retailer refers to the department store. We investigate the supply chain coordination issue and examine the supply chain agents’ performances under the mentioned two contracts. We find the analytical evidence that there is a similar relative risk performance but different absolute risk performances between the national brand and the private label. This finding provides an important implication in strategic interaction for the risk-averse department stores in product assortment and brand management. Furthermore, we explore the impact of sales effort on the supply chain system and find that the supply chain is able to achieve coordination if and only if the supplier (i.e., the national brand or the private label) is willing to share the cost of the sales effort.