With the growing importance of ESG as a must-have business strategy, this study attempted to analyze the current state of ESG practices in the Korean fashion businesses. The ESG cases of fashion business were collected from news articles searched on the largest Korean internet portal by November 2021 from October 2020 when the number of articles began to increase meaningfully. Three hundred ninety one ESG cases of 112 fashion manufacturing brands and 332 ESG cases of 49 retail brands were analyzed. Casual and outdoor/sportswear brands among fashion manufacturers were most active in ESG practices, and various online and offline retailers were practicing ESG. Approximately one-third of the fashion brands were positioned as eco-friendly concept. While environmental practices were the most practiced ESG, governance was the least practiced. Among environmental practices, fashion manufacturing businesses were most active in eco-friendly product development, while retail businesses were in eco-friendly campaign-event-service and eco-friendly packaging. The most active social practice was the contribution to communities, followed by retail businesses’ sharing growth with partner businesses. Governance practices were focused on the structure and operation of the board. Various ESG collaborations with various partners were also observed. The research result is meaningful verifying and diagnosing the ESG practices of the Korean fashion businesses.

As social media has become a part of daily life, new types of online opinion leaders are emerging, and in turn, changes in traditional fashion leaders and leadership are expected. Considering such changes, this study attempted to reexamine fashion leader types and influence characteristics from the perspective of college students as fashion followers. Students were asked to write an essay identifying their fashion leader and how and why they were influenced by him or her. Sixty essays entitled “My Fashion Leader” were collected and content-analyzed. A total of 78 fashion leaders were identified and categorized into four types including celebrities, social media influencers, friends/family/acquaintances, and people seen on the street in order of frequency. Influence characteristics of the identified fashion leaders included superiority, role model, similarity, and familiarity. Similarity was observed across all types of fashion leaders, while superiority and familiarity were identified for celebrities and friends/family/acquaintances, respectively. The results imply that celebrities, mostly those from the TV, movie, and music industries, are still important as fashion leaders in society regardless of their communication style, while friends/ family/acquaintances as opinion leaders within a consumer group are important to provide information, advice, and help. However, social media influencers between the two groups are expanding the influence.

The global marketplace is changing and retailers must decide on unique positioning strategies to attract consumers away from the competition. Socioeconomic changes are shifting consumer shopping patterns. Technology development drastically affected retail environment and consumers shopping behavior. While traditional retailers provide consumers to touch and feel merchandise and provide instant gratification, online retailers, meanwhile impress shoppers with wide selection, low prices and other consumers ratings and reviews. As the retailing industry move toward an omnichannel retailing experience, there are no exact distinction between traditional offline and online stores. Under the circumstances, retailers pursue an integrated sales experience that melds the advantages of physical stores with the information-rich experience of online shopping. In order to develop effective marketing strategy, retailers need adapting best practices from both the offline and online worlds in areas including developing products, pricing, designing the shopping experience and building relationships with customers (Brynjolfsson, Hu & Rahman, 2013). In order to do this, the first step is to understand the consumers who DO shopping in stores and “redesign shopping from scratch (Rigby, 2011): Why do they visit the stores? What do they expect from the stores? What does make their shopping experience special? What does shopping mean to consumers? The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding and conceptualizing of consumer’s perspective on shopping at this era of omnichannel retailing. Given the exploratory nature of the research, a qualitative research methodology was necessary because it is useful in gaining insights from consumers’ own perspectives (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994). The photo elicitation interview method was used for this research. This method allows the research discussion to start with real places and real experiences and visual data are useful for envisioning and speaking about possible, desired futures (Dumreucher & Kolb, 2008). For this research, we invite 20 college students to answer a research question by taking photos and explaining their photos to the researcher in the interview session. We used Dempsey and Tucker (1994)’s five step protocol for photo-interviewing. The five steps include: sourcing photographs, selecting specific photographs, preparing the interview schedule, conducting the interviews, and analyzing textual data. In order to collect sourcing photographs, we asked participants to consider the general research questions (e.g., what does shopping mean to you? What does come across your mind when you read “shopping”?) and how to take photos that reflect their view point on the research questions. Then, participants implemented their reflections by taking 30 photos of specific subjects in their surroundings (e.g., people, places, activities, or buildings) that related to the research questions and are meaningful to them during the next 2 weeks. In the selecting photographs step, photos were grouped in categories. In the interview, participants consider their photos and verbalize their thinking. In the final step, the data—photos, and interview transcripts-were analyzed (Dempsey & Tucker, 1994; Kolb, 2008) and core categories have emerged which have then been refined. The findings suggest that Korean young consumer’s concept of shopping were sorted into six categories: 1) considering various channels to shop (e.g., department store, outlet store, online store, mobile stores, offshore direct buying), 2) thinking of fashion items (e.g., clothing, shoes, cosmetics, accessories), 3) searching for promotional activities (e.g., sales, markdowns, special events, online coupons), 4) browsing and comparing attributes through online stores, 5) releasing stress/changing mood, 6) socializing with others, and 7) getting stress from shopping. Gaining a better understanding of the smart shopper will enable retailers to more accurately target this consumer group. Although various retail channels were the most photographed and mentioned in this study, department stores and mobile stores (using smartphone) were the most mentioned and photographed. Participants also mentioned browsing and comparison shopping through online stores as “pre-shopping activity.” Another area is hedonic aspect of shopping: one of the major meanings of shopping found in this study is releasing stress or changing mood. Some also mentioned that although they do shopping in order to release their stress, sometimes shopping leads to another type of stress. There are also few participants who suggested shopping is a stressful work to do. By the photo elicitation interview, this study illustrates that shopping embrace a multi-dimension of meanings and provides insights to improve our understanding of young Korean consumers’ concept of shopping. The photograph aided in the visual and emotional memory of the experience as a memory anchor as they recalled the places or moments, and using photographs in the research enabled the research to proceed to a deeper understanding and meaning