Footwear Design Strategies for the Thai Footwear Industry to Be Excellent in the World Market

Abstract

The potential of Thai industrial product design is still inferior to that of the leading competitors in the world market, which gives more importance to design during the product development to increase Thailand’s competitive edge on a commercial scale. Product design is a very important part of sustainable growth in this industry. Thus, this research aims at investigating footwear design strategies for the Thai footwear industry to be excellent in the world market. The research has been designed with a mixed method of both qualitative and quantitative study. The quantitative data were collected through a semi-structured interview of 500 designers who presented their designs to join an award competition. The results reveal that the footwear design strategies consisted of four factors: (1) design, (2) market analysis, (3) innovation, and (4) information technology. This paper utilizes the method of structural equation modeling (SEM) to establish a strategic model for competitive advantage in the Thai footwear industry. The analysis results indicate that the footwear design strategies model could help make more effective policies and organization strategies for enterprises and designers to develop themselves towards excellence in the world market.

Keywords

• strategies
• design
• footwear industry
• structural equation model
• competitive edge