Product development within a clustered environment: The case of apparel design firms

A great deal of recent academic attention has been paid to the role of location and proximity on the organizing of production. This body of work has identified the likely benefits to firms of co-locating, but despite this, there are gaps, especially in the treatment of creative clusters and the links between location and product creation processes. In this theoretical paper we discuss how clustered apparel designer firms interact with their environment, and how this geography impacts on their designing processes and the designs that emerge. We focus especially on how co-locating with other designers and creative organisations allows them to draw upon a multiplicity of intangible resources such as street scenes, social moods and atmosphere in order to create new designs. These factors are critical in the apparel design sector, but unlike factor inputs such as talent, materials or the financial and physical resources, have hardly been considered in academic writings.