Introduction

Background of Clothing[1]

It is not certain when people first started wearing clothes however, anthropologists give estimates that range between 100,000 to 500,000 years ago. The first clothes were made from natural elements such as animal skin and furs, grasses and leaves, and bones and shells. Clothing was often draped or tied however; simple needles made out of animal bone provide evidence of sewn leather and fur garments from at least 30,000 years ago. When settled Neolithic cultures discovered the advantages of woven fibers over animal hides, the making of cloth, drawing on basketry techniques, emerged as one of humankind's fundamental technologies. Hand and hand with the history of clothing goes the history of textiles. Humans had to invent weaving, spinning and other techniques and the machines needed in order to make the fabrics used for clothing. Before sewing machines, nearly all clothing was local and hand-sewn, there were tailors and seamstresses in most towns that could make individual items of clothing for customers. After the sewing machine was invented, the ready-made clothing industry took off.

Reasons of selection

What are clothes? Clothes are one of the common needs for a human beings / homo sapiens for protection. Thus, the curiosity to obtain the knowledge of the reason behind the human behaviour has become our top priority and concern in conducting the survey. In order to success in obtaining this knowledge; the demand, elasticity, market structure and the market equilibrium are crucial information in completing the survey.

Market Competition[2]

Clothing firm is categorised as the monopolistic competition market structure. Monopolistic competitions have large number of sellers and usually are firms with differentiated products with multiple sellers. It is easy to entry and exit from the industry because it has a low barrier which requires very little resources and low fixed cost to operate a business. It makes zero economic profit over the long run because of easy entry and exit. Besides that, monopolistic competitive industry have limited market power because of the characteristics of easy entry and exit, and the fact that there are limitations to how much a firm can differentiate itself from its competitors.

Problem Statement

• What factors do you consider when buying clothes?

• Would you purchase more clothes if your income had increased?

• If your preferable choice of brand increased in price, will you continue to purchase their clothes?

• If there is another brand selling clothes that are similar to your preferable brand but sold at a much lower price, will this change your choice of brand?

Objectives

-       To understand the factors of demand of clothing

-       To analyse the brief elasticity response of clothing

The limitation in conducting the survey is the lack of experience in conducting the survey. This is because of the zero exposure towards producing relevant and informative questions for the survey. Besides that, some of the respondents are not cooperative in doing the survey as they refused to answer some of the questions in the survey given.

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[1] The background are taken from (Bellis, M., n.d.)

[2] The explanation are taken from (McConnell, C. et al, 2012)