Abstract
A surge in clothing imports from Asia to South Africa in the early 2000’s resulted in both a loss of job opportunities and high levels of competition in price and product offering in the local fashion design industry. Faced by unemployment, many South African fashion designers find the need to follow entrepreneurial routes. Although in turn, entrepreneurs in South Africa face challenges such as politically-motivated economic setbacks in recent years, as well as a lack of access to financing and business skills or training. Consequently, the objective of the study was to propose an alternative framework (as opposed to conventional methods) of business planning and resource acquisition and/or business start-up to aspiring designer-entrepreneurs in South Africa who experience high levels of competition, as well as a lack of financing and a lack of skills to start a business. Alternative start-up methods were explored as possible solutions to the challenges faced by designer-entrepreneurs. It was proposed that incorporating business activities with design activities (taking a ‘lean’ and ‘bootstrapping’ approach) may reduce cost and risk during the search for a viable fashion business model, as well as the creative application of the minimum available resources to finance business start- up. The proposed alternative business start-up methods of lean start-up methodology and financial bootstrapping were applied to investigate whether South African owner- designers had employed alternative concepts, techniques and resources in practice to start their businesses. A qualitative research methodology was chosen to investigate the real-world practices of owner-designers using a case study research design. Owner- designers who started their business after the early 2000’s (corresponding with the surge in imports in the early 2000’s) were deemed the most suitable subjects for the research. The data was gathered through document study of online sources including interviews conducted with South African fashion owner-designers (15 designers), as well as articles written about them, their websites and social media pages...
M.A. (Design)