While offshoring, re-shoring and more broadly manufacturing location decisions are key topics for managers and regulators, existing research on these topics is surprisingly rare, both in strategic management and supply chain management fields. In this research, we conduct a qualitative study in the European fashion industry to document how firms are choosing the location of manufacturing and how it affects innovation. Our first results show overall high complexity of factors affecting manufacturing location choices and a significant variety of manufacturing locations across time, companies and more interestingly within each company. We argue that European fashion companies follow a “location portfolio” strategy. Also, innovation appears to be multi-dimensional and related to location choices.
