Clothing sales surge at Tesco as fashion gets more store space

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Apr 13, 2022

Tesco has reported its preliminary results for 2021/22 and for once, the company has mentioned its clothing sales as being a particular success story.

With so many parts of the business to talk about, fashion rarely gets a look-in come results time, but with this year’s figures, it’s no surprise that it has been called out.

Tesco said total group sales rose 2.5% to £54.768 billion in its latest financial year and adjusted operating profit rose 58% to £2.825 billion.

Within that, “non-food sales growth was particularly strong this year, driven mainly by Clothing”.

In fact, its clothing ops were up as much as 19.4% “as customers spent more time shopping our ranges in-store and we responded to changing customer demand in our ranges”. It didn't share the monetary value of its fashion sales.

Growth was “particularly strong in Womenswear and Kids, and benefited from a rebalancing of space between Clothing and General Merchandise, now completed in 116 of our large stores”.

This rebalancing process has made “Clothing more of a destination shop” and the “food-adjacent General Merchandise ranges simpler and easier to shop”.

Fashion and general merchandise has become increasingly important to supermarket sales in recent years and while the offer in smaller physical stores isn't always that large, superstores have dedicated plenty of space to fashion. Online, with click & collect options, has also proved to be key. 

It all means that label such as Tesco’s F&F, as well as Tu by Sainsbury’s and George at Asda are carving out larger shares of the overall UK clothing market.