Dr Courtney Chrimes
I am a Lecturer and Researcher in Fashion Digital Media at Manchester Metropolitan University. I was awarded my EPSRC DTA funded PhD in Digital Marketing from The University of Manchester, January 2021.
My main areas of expertise are in e-commerce, digital marketing, sustainability, and digital innovation, utilising qualitative and quantitative methods of inquiry. In particular, I am incredibly interested in how innovative digital technology, such as Artificial Intelligence, can help shape the future of fashion marketing and communication and support sustainable business development.
In addition to academic research, my previous industry experience as a Fashion Merchandiser has helped keep my teaching applicable to practitioners and enabled me to offer managerial insights throughout my research. Hence, I believe that I can bring invaluable insights to Future Fashion Factory projects, especially concerning sustainability and circular economies.
- Listing ID: 2624
- Contact: Dr Courtney Chrimes
- What are your aspirations and plans for the future?: My ambition is to build on my specialist knowledge and conduct further research to understand how innovative technologies can help mitigate issues within the fashion industry relating to environmental and social sustainability. To do this, I am currently working on a funded collaborative research project investigating the real-life feasibility of blockchain technology. Indeed, supported by the ‘New Research Narratives Fund’, which offers small grants of up to £3,000 to accelerate new research, the collaborative project will investigate how artificial intelligence and blockchain can facilitate various fashion industry processes by exploring their real-world application. I hope that the findings of this scoping project will help develop an understanding among industry stakeholders of the data requirements for digital tools and unveil industry attitudes toward transparency, Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and similar initiatives.
- What types of projects are you interested in working on through Future Fashion Factory?: I am incredibly interested in working on industry-led projects concerning circular economies that harness innovative technologies to reduce textile waste and enhance transparency within fashion supply chains. Moreover, my PhD research investigated how clothing criteria, such as clothing fit and style, are communicated on fashion e-commerce product pages and how clothing communication can be enhanced in the future to reduce the high levels of online clothing returns. Hence, I am also eager to work on projects related to the digital communication of tactile clothing attributes to help better support consumers’ online decision-making.