Heatwave is bad news for John Lewis as autumn range stays on rails

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Sep 17, 2019

After its disappointing recent interim results, John Lewis Partnership continued to experience sluggish sales in the latest week — the seven days to September 14 — with the parent company seeing sales down 3% at just over £201 million.

But while the Waitrose supermarkets saw only a small sales fall, the firm’s eponymous department store chain came off much worse in the period as its sales fell 6.1% year-on-year in total.

And while the Fashion department is usually its saving grace, this time around it wasn’t as the department’s sales fell a worse 7.6%. That’s perhaps no surprise as the store is now in full autumn fashion mode but the UK weather seems to have decided that it wants summer to last a few weeks longer.

The sales fall for fashion was directly attributed to warm weather impacting sales of AW19 product. And looking at the wider UK fashion retail sector, there are likely to be many more businesses finding the same problems at the moment with the mini heatwave set to make September a fashion month to forget.

That said, while Beauty, Wellbeing and Leisure sales were down 2.4%, at least sales of Beauty improved over the weekend as the company price-matched a competitor event.