• Fashion, Industry and Education
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.59-65
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• 2017

Fashion professionals these days agree that changes in the fashion business are essential and highly value creativity as a genuine source for generating new ideas in fashion products as well as fashion business practices. As fashion professionals deal with problems of which solutions do not exist or that need innovative solutions for brand or product differentiation in the fast-paced environments, interest in creativity and creative problem solving in the field has increased; therefore, fashion educators have realized that there has been an increasing need for incorporating creativity or creative problem solving into the fashion curriculum. In this study, the researcher intended to review previous research on the use of creative problem solving in classrooms in various disciplines including the field of fashion education to provide insights and suggestions for fashion educators to integrate creative problem solving into the fashion education curriculum. Previous attempts to apply creative problem solving to solve issues in fashion classrooms have mostly limited to promoting divergent thinking techniques. It is suggested for fashion educators as well as fashion students to consider creative problem solving as a process consisting of the four distinct stages in which both divergent and convergent thinking techniques should be properly utilized stimulating various thinking strategies.

• Journal of Fashion Business
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.195-215
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• 2010

The emergence of the luxury market has led numerous academic researchers, as well as marketers in the luxury market, to pay attention to both identifying luxury brand features and measuring perceptions toward luxury brands. Especially, Korea is a significant emerging market for luxury goods. Young consumers and male consumers are getting into the luxury market fast and these new segments will keep increasing. There are only a few studies related to distinctive definitions of luxury brands and measurement development for the Korean market. However, there are some limitations in these previous studies in that they did not capture the nature of luxury due to their inappropriate of subjects and approach in data collection and to lack of a perspective of Korean specific features. Thus, the purpose of this research is to identify Korean consumers' perceptions toward luxury products and, ultimately, to develop a reliable and valid measurement items for the luxury products' features for the Korean market. Defining the three high constructs(functional, emotional, and symbolic aspects) as a key needs and benefits on luxury brands, we looked at four stages of development for generating and deducting items by luxury industry experts and luxury consumers, as well as for testing measures by 20th~60th consumers. As a result, this study confirmed that luxury brands consists of high quality, high price, unique design, and luxury store; the emotional aspect construct combines craftsmanship, VIP service, and high social status; and the symbolic construct includes brand heritage and being a well-known brand. Finally, 22 measurement items (Measures of Luxury Brand for Korea: LBK) were developed for the conceptual features for luxury brands from a Korean perspective. This study provided understanding of Korean consumers' perceptions toward luxury brands from an academic perspective. For the managerial implication of this study, LBK can be utilized to judge both luxury brands and mass brands, to diagnose current a brand's luxuriousness, from the customer's point-of-view, and, finally, to measure a Key Performance Index (KPI) of luxury brand companies.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.486-499
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• 2011

Now, the Korean consumer market enters into the stage of the advanced country type's mature consumption, totally different from the consumption of the past, and among these changes, the quality enhancement and bipolarity of the consumption show clearly the rising trends together with the popularization of the Masstige Brand due to the big expansion of the quantity. Unlike the old luxury brands, available only to the rich people in the past, the Masstige Brands are tagged with reasonable and affordable prices and provide the consumers with the good quality and convenient sensibilities as good as the old famous brands, which have become new high-class brands for the middle-income class. As the middle-come people get more income and are eager to live a better life, the Masstige Brands rise fast. Therefore, the study is aimed at examining the consumer-related factors affecting the purchase of the Masstige Brands on the basis of the fashion brands. In other words, the factors affecting the formation of the positive purchasing intentions of consumers will be verified by examining the influence of such factors, as the consumer value, brand charisma, attitude and loyalty, the variables affecting the purchasing intentions of the Masstige Brands, which are found out through the proceeding researches. As the result of the verification on the assumption, it is found out that the consumer value has a positive influence on the brand charisma. Also, it is found out that the consumer value has a positive influence on the brand attitude. And, it is discovered that the brand charisma has a positive influence on the brand loyalty. It is shown that the brand attitude has a positive influence on the brand loyalty. Lastly, it is indicated that the brand loyalty has a positive influence on the purchasing intention of consumers.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.30 no.6 s.154
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• pp.928-938
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• 2006

Tween refers 'between' generation aged of 10-16 who are between child and high teens. Tweens have been regarded as one of the fast growing markets and they show some unique characteristics as next-generation consumers. This study has explored the perception of their appearances and clothing styles, style preferences, and influencing factors on clothing behavior of tweens. 120 students aged of 12-15 participated in depth interview and data were structured and categorized by applying domain analysis. Results showed tweens have great concerns on their appearances and styles, so they want to express their identities and aesthetic favors through clothing styles. As for clothing style preferences, they have multi-facet tastes such as casual, active, feminine/ masculine, sophisticated, dramatic, etc. Factors influencing on their clothing behavior include reference groups like friends, dual desires of conformity and individuality, fashion, and brand names.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.337-347
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to figure out consumer's recognition on brand's peculiar style on Korean contemporary women's apparel brand. The contemporary women's apparel brands show advanced and stylish merchandise at better price points. This segment of the Korean ready-to-wear market has been growing fast in last decades. Four contemporary women's apparel brands(I, K, M, and T) were participated in this study. The data(n=216) were collected with questionnaire survey at 24 apparel retail shops in metro Seoul area. The questionnaire measured the consumers' recognition on each brand's peculiar style. The subjects evaluated each brand's typical silhouette, materials, and style image. The results of the survey showed that the style image factors were 'stylish', 'simple', 'casual', 'feminine', and 'classic'. The style image of each brand was differentiated from others. The brand T had classic image, the brand K had simple and casual image, brand M had stylistic image, and the brand I had feminine image. The features of materials that used at the four brands were not very different by the brands. They used the high valued materials. The common features of the materials were 'smooth', 'thin' and 'light weight.'

• Journal of the Korea Fashion and Costume Design Association
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.55-73
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• 2009

Teenagers are fast in growth and very sensitive. They are more interested in appearance and clothing and they use it as a method of expressing themselves. Thus they show different attitudes toward clothing. This study is to survey teenagers' attitudes toward clothing, especially school uniform and to understand their psychological characteristics about clothing. The purpose of this study is to provide useful data in designing teenagers' school uniform which can serve to fulfill their clothing desire and beautiful school life. The results of this study can be summarized as follows. As of paradigm in clothing, they value individuality, economical efficiency, practicality, fashion, and conformity of clothes in the order of importance. They considered individuality value the most important. Students' preference of school uniform is not positive over all. About 60% of students support wearing uniform, and 50% like wearing uniform on the way to school. The reasons for wearing school uniform are psychological stability and economical efficiency. They think school uniform is well fitted for the student position and don't have to care about clothing if they wear school uniform. 63% of them prefer wearing famous brand but they think the price is too high. Comparing with male student, female students place more value on latest fashion and are more likely to purchase brand object than male students do. Female students have more experience in modification of school uniform than male students do. Based on the result of this study, we need to understand the students' attitudes toward school uniform and to accept demand of teenagers' idea in production of school uniform.

• Korean Institute of Interior Design Journal
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.220-232
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• 2013

Ever-evolving diverse communication tools bring numerous changes and improvements into the lives of humans. It is extremely important to provide visual information when communicating with consumers in the commercial arena because humans acquire over eighty percent of the information around them through sense of sight. One cannot compete with just sheer quality in today's world. Therefore, the applications of digital technology in the visual merchandising became crucial, for it can dramatically improve the market value. Among these applications is digital signage, a new media for esthetic experience. I strongly believe that this would be a new marketing tool for the brand's distinctive and unique publicity. This research has been conducted in order to find out how the fast-growing digital signage, defined by the contents, has become not just a mere digital video clip but an esthetic merchandising tool that can produce various effective marketing strategies; and to discover the characteristics that this application has brought out in the visual merchandising field of fashion stores' global SPA brands. Based on the market case study, analyses have been made for the digital signage types and strategies regarding the visual merchandising expressive elements and for the effects the digital signage application will have on publicity. According to the results, the digital signage has proven to be informative, diversely applicable and contributes greatly to the increase in sales and to the improvement of company and brand image. Thus, it is much more than just a media tool for advertisement.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.64-71
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• 2019

Climate change and global warming are the biggest challenges of the current generation. Every industry has contributed to the climate change and global warming. Even the apparel industry cannot avoid the criticism regarding fast fashion and its contribution to the pollution. The transition to the decarbonized economy is in progress. All aspects of business functions are influenced by climate change. Sustainable development and climate change are closely linked, and business plays the key role in addressing and finding solutions to the challenges of climate change. Luxury brands are the trendsetters and tastemakers. They are the leaders in the fashion industry and therefore responsible for improving on sustainability as well. Even luxury business cannot avoid environmental issues. The relation between luxury and sustainability is explored with the Burberry case based on the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) framework. There are various ways for luxury brands to excel in sustainability and affect other companies' practices. The companies can incorporate the concept of sustainability in their brand stories as part of the branding process. They can also improve demand planning accuracy and produce upcycled goods. Centering on Burberry's case, this paper aims to explore the current sustainable practices of luxury business along with its future direction toward sustainable development. Its contribution and directions for both researchers and business practitioners are discussed.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.190-203
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• 2015

The fashion industry has been rearranged by Global SPA brands (like ZARA and H&M), which are powerful retailers that integrate the value chain ranging from manufacturing to sales. SPA brands can offer good quality of clothing at a reasonable price by cutting the margin between the supply chain. They are also called fast fashions since they make expedited efforts to respond to market trends and consumers. Despite the slow growth of the fashion industry in Korea, as global SPA brands rapidly expand market share, traditional fashion companies have launched several SPA brands such as MIXXO and SPAO (E-LAND), 8SECONDS (CHEIL INDUSTRIES). The few academic studies on this subject are focused on the analysis of secondary data such as news and books. The current research is qualitative and empirical attempts to explore the success factor of SPA brands with analysis of 1:1 in-depth interviews with experts who have worked for global SPAs such as Uniqlo, H&M, and ZARA, based on the grounded theory. The main phenomenon was shown to be that global SPA brands were popular since they offer a variety of products with a large assortment at reasonable and cheap prices in a large scale and multifunctional retail store. Most of them displayed main phenomena that can be realized due to the purchasing cycle of clothing that is shorter with consumers' regarding clothing as consumables. Global SPA brands had three types of marketing strategy: sellable product, sales strategy according to consumer response, and multifunctional stores. Each global SPA brand developed marketing strategies based on core competency and national conditions. The three success factors shorten the consumer decision making process of clothing. This study concludes with implications for practitioners of SPA brands born in Korea.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.197-218
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• 2019

In addition to economic growth and national income increase, China is also experiencing rapid growth in consumption of cosmetics. About 67% of the total trade volume of Chinese cosmetics is made by e-commerce and especially K-Beauty products, which are Korean cosmetics are very popular. According to previous studies, 80% of consumer goods such as cosmetics are affected by the word of mouth information, searching the product information before purchase. Mostly, consumers acquire information related to cosmetics through comments made by other consumers on SNS such as SINA Weibo and Wechat, and recently they also use information about beauty related video channels. Most of the previous online word-of-mouth researches were mainly focused on media itself such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. However, the informational characteristics and the expression forms are also diverse. Typical types are text, picture, and video. This study focused on these types. We analyze the unstructured data of SINA Weibo, the SNS representative platform of China, and Meipai, the video platform, and analyze the impact of K-Beauty brand sales by dividing online word-of-mouth information with quantity and direction information. We analyzed about 330,000 data from Meipai, and 110,000 data from SINA Weibo and analyzed the basic properties of cosmetics. As a result of analysis, the amount of online word-of-mouth information has a positive effect on the sales of cosmetics irrespective of the type of media. However, the online videos showed higher impacts than the pictures and texts. Therefore, it is more effective for companies to carry out advertising and promotional activities in parallel with the existing SNS as well as video related information. It is understood that it is important to generate the frequency of exposure irrespective of media type. The positiveness of the video media was significant but the positiveness of the picture and text media was not significant. Due to the nature of information types, the amount of information in video media is more than that in text-oriented media, and video-related channels are emerging all over the world. In particular, China has made a number of video platforms in recent years and has enjoyed popularity among teenagers and thirties. As a result, existing SNS users are being dispersed to video media. We also analyzed the effect of online type of information on the online cosmetics sales by dividing the product type of cosmetics into basic cosmetics and color cosmetics. As a result, basic cosmetics had a positive effect on the sales according to the number of online videos and it was affected by the negative information of the videos. In the case of basic cosmetics, effects or characteristics do not appear immediately like color cosmetics, so information such as changes after use is often transmitted over a period of time. Therefore, it is important for companies to move more quickly to issues generated from video media. Color cosmetics are largely influenced by negative oral statements and sensitive to picture and text-oriented media. Information such as picture and text has the advantage and disadvantage that the process of making it can be made easier than video. Therefore, complaints and opinions are generally expressed in SNS quickly and immediately. Finally, we analyzed how product diversity affects sales according to online word of mouth information type. As a result of the analysis, it can be confirmed that when a variety of products are introduced in a video channel, they have a positive effect on online cosmetics sales. The significance of this study in the theoretical aspect is that, as in the previous studies, online sales have basically proved that K-Beauty cosmetics are also influenced by word-of-mouth. However this study focused on media types and both media have a positive impact on sales, as in previous studies, but it has been proven that video is more informative and influencing than text, depending on media abundance. In addition, according to the existing research on information direction, it is said that the negative influence has more influence, but in the basic study, the correlation is not significant, but the effect of negation in the case of color cosmetics is large. In the case of temporal fashion products such as color cosmetics, fast oral effect is influenced. In practical terms, it is expected that it will be helpful to use advertising strategies on the sales and advertising strategy of K-Beauty cosmetics in China by distinguishing basic and color cosmetics. In addition, it can be said that it recognized the importance of a video advertising strategy such as YouTube and one-person media. The results of this study can be used as basic data for analyzing the big data in understanding the Chinese cosmetics market and establishing appropriate strategies and marketing utilization of related companies.