Competitive manufacturing for reshoring textile and clothing supply chains to high-cost environment: A Delphi study

The paper focuses on the Swedish textile and clothing industry and aims to identify success factors and challenges for reshoring strategies. More specifically, a Delphi study is conducted in a sample of 19 respondents belonging to small and medium enterprises. Three elements (organizational flexibility to meet shorter lead times, high product quality, and high degrees of product/service customization) have been found as the most important success factors. At the same time, costs and lack of resources and operational capabilities have been resulted as the most important reshoring challenges. The access to skilled and knowledgeable labor in the home country were also considered challenging, since production in the fashion sector has  been largely outsourced in the last years. Lastly, practitioners identified difficulties with quality and flexibility in producing offshore as the most important enablers for future reshoring decisions.