Entreprenörskapets utmaningar – en resa i modets tecken

Sammanfattning: Being a small business in the clothing industry involves a lot of hard work that extends beyond the usual eight-hour day. It is an industry characterized by fierce competition, tough conditions and requires cutting costs, unique marketing and a strong brand to succeed. However, this is everyday life for Svensson Jeans, a young clothing company that since its inception five years ago sells its own designed clothes in Malmö's inner city. Svensson Jeans has during its lifetime gone through a variety of operational changes; they started from scratch and now they have two stores. From having several different brands in the shop they now focus exclusively on selling their own brand. The company has grown organically, and the choices of paths have been achieved through a combination of gut feeling and coincidence. Purpose: Today, the situation for the company has changed as the owners have started to realize the need for more structured activities and a clear goal to head for. Svensson Jeans is facing a number of challenges that require more thoughtfulness and planning. These challenges have been illustrated in a written case about Svensson Jeans, to force the reader to become involved and to take the role of the decision-maker. The main objective for the case is to highlight these challenges and bring them up to the surface for discussion within the company as well as within an academic environment. The case is meant to work as an eye opener and a springboard for discussion and inputs for further development of their strategy and future operations in the clothing business. From an academic point-of-view, as a secondary purope, the case and its questions are directed towards graduate students within the Industrial Engineering and Management program, who are about to start their economic specialization Method: A case seeks to problematize a real-life (or something that could be a real-life) strategic decision-making situation. Those who read the case will get the chance to take part in a "real" business situation and to find a solution puts high demands on combining knowledge from all ones previous experiences, in order to create deep learning and understanding of the situations that occur in the real business environment. Such events are not easy to find in regular course literature, which is the benefit of a case. Here are also a number of questions that the case solver will be able to answer with help from the information given in the case, and in some cases by doing more research. In this particular case, the reader will meet the brothers Mariano and Matias, founders of Svensson Jeans, in their everyday life with all its implications. The case will highlight the history of the company, its concepts, its owners and its business platform, in order to highlight the present environment in which the company functions. This way, the case will be of a multidisciplinary kind, in order to address and combine different disciplines from the students’ and other users’ perspective. There are several questions to be answered and analyzed. Accompanying the case, there is a teaching note that aims to provide suggestions for discussion of these issues, and appropriate models for this process. The decision situations above could be fruitful to discuss for further understanding of what it means to be entrepreneurial, and the types of problems entrepreneurs face. From this point-of-view, the case is also well suited for other entrepreneurial companies or smaller start-ups that are in the same phase, regardless of whether they operate in the clothing industry or not. The main challenges for a relatively young company are often alike, regardless of industry. Conclusions: During the case study, it was found that all the strategic challenges that the company is facing today can be traced to one main question; what is the goal for Svensson Jeans in the future? Is it going to be a complete lifestyle-brand providing and selling different kinds of brands and products in several multiple Svensson Jeans stores and resellers around the world? Or should it be a niched brand with one or only a few stores in Sweden selling only clothes from their own brand? This is the main finding that is described in the case. Naturally there are several other challenges and questions that came up during the case study – questions of marketing, store concepts, distribution channels were other important aspects that are discussed.