Consumers Speak: Apparel Changes that Impact Satisfaction
Consumers’ Power to Influence Trends
Retail customers possess an unprecedented level of power to influence clothing trends and to affect the purchase decisions of other shoppers by sharing their experiences with apparel purchases on retailer websites. More than ever, clothing designers, manufacturers, and distributors must understand and utilize customer feedback to enhance retail offerings in order to ensure lasting competitiveness.
Apparel Changes that Impact Satisfaction
Cotton Incorporated has undertaken breakthrough research, capturing more than 260,000 reviews on 30,000+ apparel and home textile products to gain unique consumer knowledge.
This webinar covers how consumer reviews impact purchases and how apparel performance issues coupled with fabrication changes can adversely impact shopper loyalty to retailers and brands.
Guide to Improved Shrinkage Performance of Cotton Fabrics
To be competitive, apparel companies need to ensure that shrinkage is low and is consistent from garment to garment. However, rigid and arbitrary fabric shrinkage specifications are not the answer. Instead, apparel firms and mills need to work as partners to ensure that cotton apparel products are planned and engineered in such a way as to control shrinkage while meeting other requirements and expectations.
In this bulletin, we explore in detail the types and causes of shrinkage in cotton fabrics and describe methods for reducing shrinkage. The key to success is to engineer the product from fiber selection through all processing steps, setting reasonable specifications based on construction parameters and taking into account how shrinkage is affected by fiber, yarn size and type, construction variables, wet-processing procedures, finishing procedures, apparel manufacturing processes, and garment care labeling and laundering practices.
Processing 100% Cotton Woven Fabrics for Filling Stretch
There are several ways to obtain filling stretch in woven fabrics. This technical bulletin explains the concept to obtain this characteristic by slack mercerizing with sodium hydroxide and gives two specific examples of 100% cotton fabrics thus treated.
Conventional equipment found in a continuous finishing plant is usually adequate for processing, and commercially available chemical finishes can be applied. Fabric widths and yields require special consideration since these factors are different in a stretch construction when compared to more rigid fabrics.
Colorfastness of Cotton Textiles
Today’s consumer is more sophisticated than ever. They are conscious not only of style and comfort but also of care and durability. They demand a quality product. Market studies show that consumers make many purchase choices based on color. Therefore, a fabric’s ability to retain its original color is one of the most important properties of a textile product.
The colorfastness or color retention of cotton textiles is influenced by a number of variables that occur both pre-consumer and post-consumer. This report summarizes how variations in raw materials, chemicals, manufacturing processes, and consumer practices all have an effect on the performance characteristics of a fabric. Manufacturers must understand how the many variables affect colorfastness to achieve the ultimate goal of consumer satisfaction.
Clothing Changes that Impact Satisfaction
Research reveals that unfavorable consumer opinions about clothing purchases could be detrimental to the reputations of retailers and brands. Direct feedback in the form of customer reviews can be used to help resolve issues with clothing and reveal ways to boost consumer preferences for buying apparel. Cotton Incorporated’s Customer Comments Research™, an analysis of more than 260,000 reviews of over 30,000 apparel and home textiles products, provides leading market intelligence to help manufacturers and retailers prevent consumer dissatisfaction and maximize customer loyalty.
