The Dongdaemoon fashion apparel market has formed a unique supply chain called a self-fulfillment supply network, which covers the entire process from providing raw materials and manufacturing to sales. It gives the market competitive advantages in terms of setting or following fads, providing variety of styles and having a short leadtime. This has helped the market become the central player in the domestic apparel wholesale trades. However, recent changes in the market environment such as the increase of preference for brand named products and the emergence of alternative low-price channels are driving the wholesalers to search other options.
Supply switching to China is one of them. It is a very lethal challenge, for it can have an effect on the supply network structure, itself. So, in this research, two questions were examined. The first is what advantages the supply switching can offer and the second is how the switching in the level of the individual wholesaler (micro level) will change the supply network structure (macro level). Finally, the effect on the competitive advantages of the market was examined.
For the first question, a comparative framework was developed based on the attributes of operations performance and interaction effect in clustering. The former attributes are cost, quality, speed, flexibility and dependability, and the latter are transaction cost, search cost and information spill-over.
For the second question, the micro-macro bridge, the concept of robustness implied in the network topology was used. It assumes that the competitive advantages are built-up from relations between agents taking part in the fashion cluster. This approach regards the supply network as just s network structure consisting of nodes (agents) and links (relations), and shows that large wholesalers are playing a critical role as a hub in the network. Therefore, we can deduct that the removal (supply switching) of the large wholesalers will cause the sudden destruction of competitive advantages.
