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Published
Sep 8, 2017
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UK fashion has good August as high street sales rise - BDO

Published
Sep 8, 2017

Footfall may been patchy but it turns out that August was the best month on the UK high street in almost two years, BDO’s High Street Sales Tracker (HSST) showed on Friday.


Footfall may have been down in UK stores last month but shoppers still spent more



Comparable sales rose 2% year-on-year and that also made it the best August in four years. So what exactly went right last month?

BDO’s figures show how a marked rise in ‘staycations’ by Britons and an influx of overseas tourists – both of which have been driven by the weak pound – helped push sales of lifestyle goods up 3.1% year-on-year in August.

And while fashion sales have struggled all year to generate growth, a comparable rise of 1.5% for August represented the sector’s best performance since last November. Sellers of homewares also saw year-on-year sales increase by 1.9%.

But while the fashion sector rose, it still has a lot of ground to make up. That’s because August 2016 had seen a 3.3% fall and August 2015 saw an even worse 5.5% drop so the sector isn’t even back to where it was in 2014 just yet.

BDO conceded that overall footfall dropped last month, despite the higher sales, but while this most likely true to the online effect, it also said that online “struggled” with 18.3% growth for the month.

While that was the second-lowest monthly growth rate in the year to date, “struggled” is perhaps too strong a word. Online is still clearly bounding ahead in strong double-digits and as the sector gets bigger, growth rates will inevitably slow from the ‘boom town’ surges of its early days.

Meanwhile, online lifestyle sales rose 19.7% in August, but fashion retailers lagged with ‘only’ a 16.7% rise, the figure perhaps dented by the higher sales being made in physical stores.

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