Buying Power: How Retail Decisions Quietly Reshape Fashion’s Supply Chain

Jenny Daphne Pitsillides – Editor | Re:Fabricate — Real Solutions for a Better Fashion Industry

At nine thirty in the morning, before the doors open, the shop floor is hushed. Rails are adjusted by centimetres. Lighting is tested again. Somewhere above the perfume hall, a buying team is finalising numbers that will ripple far beyond the building itself. Nothing dramatic. Just quantities, clauses, margins. And yet, this is where some of fashion’s most consequential sustainability decisions quietly take place.

Retailers rarely present themselves as environmental actors. They are curators, tastemakers, merchants of desire. But in a system where most brands produce to order, the retailer’s buying decision often determines what is made, in what material, and under what conditions. The value chain bends, subtly, around the buy order.

This case study sets the stage for department stores like Selfridges and Harrods, not as moral leaders, but as structural forces. Their influence lies less in campaigns than in paperwork.

The quiet authority of the buy

For emerging and established brands alike, wholesale orders remain a form of validation. They also bring constraint. To be stocked by a major retailer is to agree, implicitly, to a set of expectations that extend beyond aesthetics.

Retail buyers decide not only what appears on shelves, but how much is produced and how often. Conservative orders can discourage overproduction. Large, inflexible ones can lock suppliers into risky volume commitments. Either way, buying decisions sit upstream, shaping production before a garment exists.

Sustainability enters here not as a slogan, but as a variable. Increasingly, it is folded into buying criteria alongside price, delivery windows and sell through projections.

Listing as leverage

Before a single unit ships, brands must meet listing requirements. These are rarely public facing, but they matter. Packaging specifications, fibre disclosures, traceability documentation. Sometimes ethical audits, sometimes simply a declaration.

Retailers with scale can request these as standard. Smaller brands comply because access matters. Larger brands comply because refusal risks reputational friction.

What is notable is how listing requirements tend to evolve. Rarely all at once. A recycled content threshold here. A ban on certain finishes there. Over time, these incremental asks normalise different ways of working across a supplier base.

Selfridges, for example, has positioned its buying teams as internal filters, gradually shifting what is considered acceptable to sell. Not perfect, not comprehensive, but directional. The listing process becomes a soft form of governance, one enforced by commercial reality rather than regulation.

Materials, preferred not prescribed

Preferred material lists are another quiet instrument. They do not ban outright. They suggest. Organic cotton over conventional. FSC certified viscose over opaque alternatives. Recycled synthetics where performance allows.

For brands, this nudges design conversations earlier. A fabric choice becomes a negotiation, not just an aesthetic decision. Mills respond accordingly, investing in certifications because demand signals have shifted.

This is value chain thinking in practice. Retailers rarely dictate design, but their preferences recalibrate what is viable at scale. The result is less about radical innovation than gradual substitution. Change by repetition.

Harrods has taken a notably cautious approach here, favouring dialogue with long term brand partners over abrupt mandates. The impact is slower, but often more durable.

When returns come back

Take back schemes sit at the intersection of customer experience and operational complexity. For retailers, they are expensive. Logistically awkward. Rarely profitable.

And yet, they are becoming part of the retail offer. In store drop offs for old garments. Partnerships with resale or recycling platforms. Experiments rather than solutions.

The significance lies less in volume than in visibility. When a department store hosts a take back point, it signals a different relationship to product life. Brands are drawn into this conversation whether they participate directly or not.

Over time, these schemes feed data back into buying decisions. What returns quickly. What fails early. What materials are hardest to process. The feedback loop tightens.

Pressure without spectacle

Supplier pressure is rarely loud. It does not need to be. A buyer asking the same question season after season is often enough.

Can this be traced further back?
Is there an alternative mill?
What happens if this finish is removed?

These questions accumulate. They shape internal brand conversations. They influence which suppliers survive and which struggle to keep up.

Importantly, pressure is uneven. Brands with strong sell through wield more negotiating power. Smaller labels absorb more of the cost. This imbalance is real and unresolved. Retail influence is not neutral.

But nor is it meaningless. In the absence of binding global regulation, buying decisions remain one of the few levers capable of shifting practice at scale.

Why this matters now

As legislation inches closer and consumer scrutiny fluctuates, retailers sit in a peculiar middle ground. Visible enough to be criticised. Powerful enough to effect change. Cautious enough to move slowly.

What this case study suggests is not that department stores hold the answer. It is that their influence is already embedded in the system. Sustainability happens here not through grand gestures, but through spreadsheets, contracts and repeat conversations.

The shop floor opens. The rails are ready. What looks effortless has already been decided.

References

Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2017) A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future.

Fashion Transparency Index (2023) Wholesale and Retail Accountability.

Selfridges Group (2022) Project Earth Update.

Harrods (2023) Sustainability Progress Overview.