Patrizia Pepe: Unconventional Innovation and Integration in Fashion Supply Chain

Tessilform is an Italian medium-sized enterprise producing clothing, footwear, bags, and accessories for young women, men, and girls under the brand Patrizia Pepe, and can be considered one of best practices for its positive financial performance, attained through a unique proactive and reactive intelligence system for approaching innovation with an obsession with details. Tessilform company is an organization permeated by creative thinking that could be defined as a thinking organization. Its dynamic hybrid business model is a flexible lean and agile integrated system. Fast and flexible capabilities infuse its entire supply chain, with a joint focus on continuous supply chain process innovation, to deliver high-quality products and customer service levels. The supply chain collaboration in trying and experimenting new solutions enables the fast adoption of new technologies together with its supply chain partners. This approach to process innovation, called collaborative experimentation, drives to a more flexible supply chain that easily reacts to change and is able to quickly respond to new trends and market challenges. Patrizia Pepe’s case study explains “unconventional” innovation as composed by three dimensions: being a thinking organization; evolving an integrated system as business model; and continuously innovating processes, including collaborative experimentation with supply chain partners. In this chapter, we review this case story and vision, supported by the leaders’ words to discover the real roots of their particular “unconventional” innovation approach that drives their success.