Social Entrepreneurship: Best Practices in the Fashion Industry

Have you ever wondered how social entrepreneurs are revolutionizing the world? What characteristics these change makers have, how they build new hybrid business models and develop best practices? Social and eco-venturing has renewed the way people think about business and management in class- and boardrooms around the world. Scholars and entrepreneurs are searching for creative ways to grasp this hot topic, to teach and to practice it. This is the first book that takes a narrative approach to social-eco entrepreneurship and provides fresh perspectives to this rapidly growing field. The phenomenon under study is the ethical fashion movement, a growing network of entrepreneurs who design highly attractive fashion and accessories, build sustainable value chains and work with fabrics such as bamboo, seaweed and corn fibers. With a relative short history of six years, ethical fashion is a promising empirical field to learn more about the role of topics like aesthetics, emotions and gender in creating sustainable enterprises. Through the use of innovative methodologies such as ethnographic case studies and video-interviews with over 80 entrepreneurs, this study provides rich insights in sustainable venturing in a field that is on the verge of becoming mainstream green. Scholars and practitioners alike can expand their horizon with novel perspectives on theory and method and learn how to create and sustain eco and social ventures. Executives, company representatives and designers in the fashion industry will benefit from tools that push them to do ’business as unusual’. Students of both (fashion) design as well as management and organization theory will find this book a fascinating read and might consider their own career as sustainable entrepreneurs.