Abstract:
During the past twenty years, the global fashion apparel industry remarkably evolved
with the expansion of the boundaries. The inclination of retailers for low cost, design
flexibility, quality, and shorter lead times to the market has become the key strategies
of the changing fluctuations and is known as fast fashion. Sri Lankan fashion retail
apparel industry being novel, emerging, and conventional has a high potential for fast
fashion which is not established well. For the development of fast fashion, examination
of it through consumer perspective is important and yet underdeveloped. Hence, this
study contributes to the limited literature on this context. Existing literature revealed
four important factors that influence consumer buying decisions on fashion apparel as
product dimension, individual dimension, social-influence dimension, and marketing
dimension. The basic stimulus-response model by Kotler (1997), Perpetuating fast
fashion consumption cycle by Simpson (2019), Consumer clothing purchase –
decision-making model in traditional form by Chen (2017) was used to determine the
relationship between the identified factors and the consumer buying decision making.
Based on Saunders’s research onion model (2009), this study carries a positivism
philosophy due to being highly structured and relying on quantifiable observation. The
deductive approach was used to develop hypotheses for the study based on the
conceptual framework. The mono method of study was utilized since only quantitative
data were collected and analyzed. The data collected from 203 respondents were
evaluated using SPSS software. Through the evaluation, it was proven that all the
hypotheses are positive and correlate with consumer buying decision-making when
considered on their own. The product dimension does not indicate a correlation when
cumulated with other independent variables. This may be due to the multi-collinearity
effect. Therefore, this dimension was excluded from the regression model. Moreover,
the present research findings are in line with the literature review proving all four
independent variables has an impact on consumer buying decision on fast fashion
apparel within the local context."
