Towards an understanding of Sri Lankan consumer’s second-hand fashion consumption

Abstract

One of the worst pollutants in the world is allegedly the fashion industry. Landfills receive enormous amounts of post-consumer trash each year. However, as current customers' awareness of environmental issues grows, they are increasingly drawn to wearing used clothing. The concept of second-hand fashion consumption, however, clearly lacks awareness in the Sri Lankan context. In the qualitative study, it incorporates the theoretical notion of the means-end chain model and demonstrates five consideration values of second-hand consumers: price-consciousness, emotional bond consciousness, comfortability consciousness, quality and brand consciousness, and social and environmental consciousness. Additionally, we demonstrate non-second-hand fashion consumers' consideration values of social status consciousness, hygienic consciousness, comfortability consciousness, quality and brand consciousness, and self-expressive consciousness. Ten hypotheses were developed based on the findings. Hypotheses were investigated using a survey questionnaire in study two. The data were analysed using multiple regression analysis in SPSS. As the findings indicated, consumer purchase intention and word-ofmouth intention grew as emotional bonds and consumer knowledge increased, and with low and

medium consumer knowledge, they decreased. So, consumers with high emotional bonds have the

highest

consumer knowledge, purchase intention, and word-of-mouth intention. Purchase intention increased as hygienic factors and consumer knowledge grew, whereas it declined at low and medium levels, indicating that consumers with high knowledge had the highest purchase intention. This study sheds some light on the growing knowledge of second-hand consumption by first identifying Sri Lankan consumer values and then studying how consumer knowledge interacts with their purchase intention and also word-of-mouth intention. This study also has practical implications by highlighting a few opportunities and constraints related to the second-hand fashion retail sector in Sri Lankan fashion retail.