Editor’s Note
This review examines blockchain’s dual role in revolutionizing fashion supply chains—enhancing traceability and transparency while navigating significant adoption hurdles.
Blockchain Technology has shown tremendous potential to be a foundation for the currently shifting paradigm towards more traceable and transparent supply chains. This review highlights the opportunities that exist in adapting Blockchain Technology in the fashion and textile supply chain, while also providing insight into the challenges of adopting this technology. This paper provides a systematic review of the potential of Blockchain Technology within the fashion and textile industry’s supply chain to analyse its role in traceability, transparency, and product authenticity. To achieve this, a substantive number of research papers and non-scholarly resources have been scrutinised. An emphasis was placed on topics regarding Blockchain Technology (BT), the fashion and textile industry and supply chain (manufacturing and distribution), traceability, transparency, and product authenticity. The selected research papers range from empirical analysis, argumentative, case studies, opinion articles, review articles, short reports, and book chapters.
The exciting emergence of Blockchain Technology (BT) has revolutionised many industries over the past decade (Kimani et al., 2020). BT is a decentralised and distributed digital ledger that allows for unalterable record-keeping (Ahad et al., 2020). The immutable feature of this technology has tremendous potential for the fashion and textile industry to improve its transparency and traceability in supply chain operations (Agrawal et al., 2018). Understanding the application of BT in the fashion and textile industry is a complex task due to the scale of the industry, which was valued at 1.5 trillion US dollars in 2021 and is estimated to reach 2 trillion by 2026 (Smith, 2022), as shown in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1
The global fashion and apparel industry value in billion U.S. Dollars from 2013 to 2026 (Smith, 2022).
Moreover, the fashion and textile industry is cluttered with complex supply chains (Garcia-Torres et al., 2019). The industry is dependent on global supply chains for manufacturing and distribution processes ranging from sourcing raw materials to catering finished products to customers (Masson et al., 2007). The inherent complexity of supply chains is often used to obscure the origin, tracing, and authenticity of fashion and textile products (Li, 2013). In addition, unethical and corrupt practices within supply chains, such as forced child labour, modern slavery, and disregard for the environmental consequences can be hidden from both the retailer and the customer (De Aguiar Hugo et al., 2021). While these cost-cutting practices can increase the retailer’s profit margin, they also have the potential to jeopardise the customer’s trust in their favourite brands and in extreme cases, also the customer’s health (Bikoff et al., 2015). The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has reiterated how essential it is to maintain healthy living and a natural balance with the planet. The retail landscape is set to resume normality, compared to before the pandemic, by the fourth quarter of 2023 (BoF-McKinsey&Company, 2021). While the world faced multiple lockdowns, unpredictable fluctuations in consumer trends created new opportunities for emerging technology in businesses. BT is one among the others which aided many businesses with maintaining their global supply chains while simultaneously enhancing the customer experience. This paper systematically reviews the potential of BT based on its inherent properties and capabilities in the manufacturing and distribution areas of the fashion and textile supply chain. The complex structure of the fashion and textile industry will be discussed emphasising the diverse and complex nature of their supply chains. This paper utilises a narrative approach of synthesising the information to bring the findings of the systematic review of the key research topics in structured summaries. This is achieved by mapping the narrative paragraphs under the thematic headings. This strategy has assisted in providing a structural flow to the relative evidence found within the course of conducting this review.