Purpose: Social media and sustainability are changing Chinese consumers’ consumption behavior in notable ways. Few apparel industry sustainability efforts are enforced or well known in China. As China operates its own social media sites, it is necessary to study Chinese social media, rather than Western types, in order to understand its influence on Chinese consumer behavior with regard to sustainability. By extending the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the prototype willingness model, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how Chinese consumers were taught their environmentally sustainable apparel (ESA) consumption behavior through social media, and also how the influence of peers affected their purchase intentions. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 238 survey responses were collected and analyzed from a Chinese research firm in 2016. In accord with the study objectives, an exploratory factor analysis was first conducted, and then a two-step analysis of a structural equation model was employed for hypothesis testing. To test the significance of hypothesized mediated effects, a bootstrap procedure with 2,000 bootstrap samples from the original data was used to compute bias-corrected 95% CI for indirect effects. Moreover, hierarchical regressions were demonstrated to verify the unique contribution of social media influence. Findings: The study findings support the previous literature that indicated positive attitudes toward environmentally sustainable purchasing behavior increased as Chinese consumers learned about social and environmental issues. Also, results of the analysis revealed that Chinese consumers’ engagement with social media and their peers were important social influences that were directly tied to increasing sustainable apparel purchase intentions. Originality/value: By extending two grand theories of the prototype willingness model theory and the TRA, this study underlines a novel link between the influence of social media and ESA purchase intentions among Chinese consumers. Results are valuable in a global context as it is one of only a few studies to explore Chinese consumers’ purchase intentions of ESA through an exclusive social media platform – WeChat – in China.

The relationship between the fashion retail industry’s working environment and the high rate of employee turnover has been highlighted as one of the key concerns for negative organizational performance in both the short and long term. This relationship creates a need to investigate the ethical climate within fashion retail businesses, employees’ attitudes toward their jobs, and employees’ turnover intention, as these factors can influence organizations’ performance including their likelihood of achieving the triple bottom lines of sustainability. Based on social exchange and human and social capital theories, this study investigated how employees’ ethical climate and turnover intention are affected by both individual- and organizational-level factors, and their impact on the triple bottom lines of organizational sustainability performance. This study empirically tested a structural model based on the survey responses from 278 U.S. fashion retail employees. The findings show that an ethical climate can enhance employees’ job attitude as well as all three dimensions of organizational sustainability performance—financial, social, and environmental. Creating an ethical climate in an organization can decrease employees’ turnover intention, but also employees’ attitudes towards their jobs lowers their turnover intention. The study’s findings reveal that not only can employees’ attitudes toward their jobs impact organizational sustainability performance, but creating an ethical working environment is another important way to improve organizational sustainability performance.

With increased concern for environmental and social issues, consumers and the apparel industry have become more interested in the topic of sustainability. Numerous brands strive to reposition in sustainability by employing credible sources and maintaining information transparency to get consumers’ recognition. By employing the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework, this study experimented with how sustainability positioning with credible sources (EPA vs. Celebrity vs. Social Media Influencer) and high (vs. low) transparency influence brand attachment, trust, and identification, leading to eWOM and brand loyalty. The findings indicate that sustainable positioning with credible sources (i.e., EPA and Social Media influencers) could achieve consumers’ positive brand attachment, trust, and identification in social media marketing. However, we did not find evidence of the impact of high (vs. low) transparency on these dependable variables. Furthermore, brand loyalty and eWOM are significantly influenced by consumers’ brand attachment and trust, whereas brand identification positively affects brand loyalty only, not eWOM. Additionally, this study found that women and higher-income groups had a high preference for sustainable brands.

Numerous brands utilize social media to capture consumers’ interests while promoting their sustainability goals. To understand how sustainable fashion brands communicate with their consumers, this study explored the visual and textual information sustainable fashion brands post on social media. Data were collected from sustainable fashion brands’ social media pages, and a total of 1525 images and captions and 140,735 comments were analyzed. By employing color theory and the theory of speech acts, HSV color analysis and the SVM classification model were used to extract information. The results showed that the images and captions posted by all three brands were consistent with their brand identities and sustainability goals. We also found that there were significant differences among the three brands when comparing posts employing expressive and assertive acts with posts using directive and assertive acts. These results indicate that social media users are more likely to leave comments when they read posts containing expressive and directive acts. These findings will allow fashion social media marketers to select appealing images and colors to engage consumers as well as to choose appropriate speech acts to deliver information to achieve their sustainability goals.