Circular Fashion Design and Brand Awareness in Emerging Market Apparel Startups

This study explores the connections among circular fashion design, sustainable brand communication, and brand awareness in apparel startups within emerging markets, while also assessing how consumer environmental consciousness moderates these links. Grounded in customer-based brand equity theory and signaling theory, it positions brand awareness as the result of interactions between sustainability-focused product design, effective communication efforts, and consumers’ environmental values. Employing a quantitative cross-sectional approach, researchers gathered data from 385 consumers via a 5-point Likert-scale questionnaire shared through Google Forms, then analyzed it using IBM SPSS for reliability checks, exploratory factor analysis, multiple linear regression, and moderation analysis via Hayes’ Process Macro (Model 1). Results showed that circular fashion design (β = 0.588) and sustainable brand communication (β = 0.609) both significantly boost brand awareness, highlighting how embedding sustainability in products and conveying it clearly can enhance recognition and recall. Moreover, consumer environmental consciousness acted as a notable moderator (β = 0.481), amplifying the positive impact of circular fashion design on brand awareness, as environmentally aware individuals tend to notice and appreciate such initiatives more strongly. This study contributes to the sustainable fashion and branding literature by integrating circular product design, sustainability communication, and consumer environmental consciousness within a unified framework, thereby extending customer-based brand equity and signaling perspectives to the underexplored context of emerging-market apparel startups. Practically, the findings provide actionable guidance for startups to strengthen competitive brand visibility by embedding authentic circular attributes into product design, communicating sustainability initiatives clearly and credibly, and targeting environmentally conscious consumers who are more responsive to circular value propositions.