The enormous impact of artificial intelligence has been realized in transforming the fashion and apparel industry in the past decades. However, the research in this domain is scattered and mainly focuses on one of the stages of the supply chain. Due to this, it is difficult to comprehend the work conducted in the distinct domain of the fashion and apparel industry. Therefore, this paper aims to study the impact and the significance of artificial intelligence in the fashion and apparel industry in the last decades throughout the supply chain. Following this objective, we performed a systematic literature review of research articles (journal and conference) associated with artificial intelligence in the fashion and apparel industry. Articles were retrieved from two popular databases “Scopus” and “Web of Science” and the article screening was completed in five phases resulting in 149 articles. This was followed by article categorization which was grounded on the proposed taxonomy and was completed in two steps. First, the research articles were categorized according to the artificial intelligence methods applied such as machine learning, expert systems, decision support system, optimization, and image recognition and computer vision. Second, the articles were categorized based on supply chain stages targeted such as design, fabric production, apparel production, and distribution. In addition, the supply chain stages were further classified based on business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) to give a broader outlook of the industry. As a result of the categorizations, research gaps were identified in the applications of AI techniques, at the supply chain stages and from a business (B2B/B2C) perspective. Based on these gaps, the future prospects of the AI in this domain are discussed. These can benefit the researchers in academics and industrial practitioners working in the domain of the fashion and apparel industry.

Compared to other industries, fashion apparel retail faces many challenges in predicting future demand for its products with a high degree of precision. Fashion products’ short life cycle, insufficient historical information, highly uncertain market demand, and periodic seasonal trends necessitate the use of models that can contribute to the efficient forecasting of products’ sales and demand. Many researchers have tried to address this problem using conventional forecasting models that predict future demands using historical sales information. While these models predict product demand with fair to moderate accuracy based on previously sold stock, they cannot fully be used for predicting future demands due to the transient behaviour of the fashion industry. This paper proposes an intelligent forecasting system that combines image feature attributes of clothes along with its sales data to predict future demands. The data used for this empirical study is from a European fashion retailer, and it mainly contains sales information on apparel items and their images. The proposed forecast model is built using machine learning and deep learning techniques, which extract essential features of the product images. The model predicts weekly sales of new fashion apparel by finding its best match in the clusters of products that we created using machine learning clustering based on products’ sales profiles and image similarity. The results demonstrated that the performance of our proposed forecast model on the tested or test items is promising, and this model could be effectively used to solve forecasting problems.

Growing use of social media such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., by consumers leads to the vast repository of consumer generated data. Collecting and exploiting these data has been a great challenge for clothing industry. This paper aims to study the impact of Twitter on garment sales. In this direction, we have collected tweets and sales data for one of the popular apparel brands for 6 months from April 2018 – September 2018. Lexicon Approach was used to classify Tweets by sentence using Naïve Bayes model applying enhanced version of Lexicon dictionary. Sentiments were extracted from consumer tweets, which was used to map the uncertainty in forecasting model. The results from this study indicate that there is a correlation between the apparel sales and consumer tweets for an apparel brand. “Social Media Based Forecasting (SMBF)” is designed which is a fuzzy time series forecasting model to forecast sales using historical sales data and social media data. SMBF was evaluated and its performance was compared with Exponential Forecasting (EF) model. SMBF model outperforms the EF model. The result from this study demonstrated that social media data helps to improve the forecasting of garment sales and this model could be easily integrated to any time series forecasting model.

Managing campaigns and promotions effectively is vital for the fashion retail industry. While retailers invest a lot of money in campaigns, customer retention is often very low. At innovative retailers, data-driven methods, aimed at understanding and ultimately optimizing campaigns are introduced. In this application paper, machine learning techniques are employed to analyze data about campaigns and promotions from a leading Swedish e-retailer. More specifically, predictive modeling is used to forecast the profitability and activation of campaigns using different kinds of promotions. In the empirical investigation, regression models are generated to estimate the profitability, and classification models are used to predict the overall success of the campaigns. In both cases, random forests are compared to individual tree models. As expected, the more complex ensembles are more accurate, but the usage of interpretable tree models makes it possible to analyze the underlying relationships, simply by inspecting the trees. In conclusion, the accuracy of the predictive models must be deemed high enough to make these data-driven methods attractive.