Abstract
The fashion industry, amid its highest growth and prosperity, stands amongst the most polluting and socially abusive industries. To curtail these trends, the research stream of circular business models (CBMs) recently emerged as a new one to focus on the preservation of resources and/ or promoting societal wellbeing through slowing and closing material loops. As the success of CBMs also relies on customer engagement, which still remains an under-researched area, this paper aims to unearth the relative importance of circularity and customers’ willingness-to-pay for each selected attribute. Based upon a choice-based conjoint analysis (n=365), this paper shows that circularity is an important attribute for engaging customers, followed by price, quality, and brand. Interestingly, higher levels of circularity go along with a lower customer engagement and a lower willingness-to-pay, if customers are neither incentivized (e.g., through discount initiatives) nor educated (through awareness raising activities) towards the purchase of circular products.