The fashion products are believed that reinforce the inequities, exploit workers, spur resource use, increase environmental impact, and generate waste. Sustainability has been recognized as a major concern worldwide, and this also increases considerations regarding the challenges to business need to be faced in the fashion industry. How much sustainable value do customers perceived and how much does the evaluation from customer upon the sustainable performance influence their customer equity? For answering this question, the ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) is selected as the theory of this study. Based on ACSI this study applies an index to measure the fashion companies’ sustainable performance in retailing and supply chain based on consumer’s evaluation. In this model, perceived sustainable quality, perceived sustainable value and sustainable expectation are designed as influencing factors.

Introduction

The global apparel industry is worth $3 trillion, accounts for 2% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and employs 33.0 million textile workers, an increase from 19.7 million during the past 25 years. Despite the economic value, the fashion industry has negative social environmental impacts such as worker exploitation, overuse of resources, and waste generation (Fletcher, 2007). Consequently, the fashion industry has tried to become more efficient by lowering prices (Reiley & DeLong, 2011) while meeting needs for sustainable development (Kong, Ko, Chae, & Mattila, 2016) and customer desires for green products (Kong & Ko, 2017). Thus, the fashion industry is becoming more eco-friendly by transforming consumption patterns (Niinimäki & Hassi, 2011). However, the production and consumption improvements have reached a peak in deriving benefits. The public is now aware of sustainability reports and CSR reports showing that most famous fashion brand managers have adopted sustainable strategies to achieve competitive advantage and to meet the direct and indirect interests of the shareholders, employees, customers, community pressure groups, and other stakeholders, without affecting their future needs (Niinimäki & Hassi, 2011). How do consumers assess sustainability in fashion industry? How do their assessments then affect the interests of fashion stakeholders? How does the popularity of sustainability affect future profitability? Does sustainability transfer to competitive advantage?