Management of products in the apparel manufacturing industry using DEMATEL-based analytical network process technique

To reduce environmental pollution and resource waste in manufacturing, it is important to discuss the increase in consumers' willingness to buy sustainable clothing and their satisfaction with it, as well as ideas on product design optimization and marketing strategies of environmental protection clothing enterprises as well as business and logistics operations. The approach used in this study to obtain the overall rank of criteria is a combination of the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and Decision-making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory based on ANP (DANP). Using Muji brand clothing as the empirical research object, this paper seeks to investigate the important factors and consumer preferences in purchasing sustainable clothing. We collected 140 criterion-importance questionnaires and 161 IPA questionnaires. Through literature review and the Delphi method, this study provides an important criterion framework for sustainable clothing, and it used the DEMATEL-based Analytical Network Process (ANP) method to determine the causal relationships among the purchasing factors of sustainable clothing and the importance ranking of these factors. According to the findings, the criterion of "sustainable material" is the most important factor in consumers' decisions to purchase sustainable clothing, and the "environmental protection brand image" and "value expression" are key factors that should be optimized. The evaluation model can be widely used in clothing design, marketing, questionnaire making, evaluation indicators, enterprise development, business operations, and other fields. Such a study has strong implications for industry 4.0 research in the future.