John Lewis has record trading week, fashion, beauty and GHD strong

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Nov 29, 2016

John Lewis always looked set to be one of the big winners from the Black Friday weekend surge and its weekly trading figures released Tuesday showed that it certainly was as it saw its biggest ever seven-day period.

In the week to November 26, sales rose 6.5% but didn’t quite make £200m. Instead the department stores and e-tail giant had to make do with £199.8m.

But with Black Friday itself being its biggest ever trading day, it didn’t seem to be complaining.

In category sales, Electricals led the way with an 11% year-on-year increase with GHD hair straighteners among the bestsellers.

Fashion sales were up 4.6% and the retailer had a particularly strong week in beauty (+13.4%), womenswear (+15.1%), menswear (+8.1%), and sports (+26.1%). Bestsellers included Ted Baker and Michael Kors in women's accessories, Barbour in menswear and womenswear, and Calvin Klein pyjamas and lingerie.

With fewer deals on branded items, in Home its sales rose only 0.9% where key product highlights included sales from Joseph Joseph, Le Creuset, Portmeirion and Charbonnel and Walker. Furniture sales as a category were up 4.5%.

The company said it traded well in both stores and online with its stores becoming busier as the weekend progressed.

In distribution, its Magna Park centre saw a record day on Saturday when it processed 33% more units than the equivalent day in 2015. Across the weekend, it picked on average 12,000 units per hour across its network.

On Black Friday itself, customers shopped on mobile phones between midnight and 09:00, but desktop quickly took the largest share of traffic from 09:00 onwards as customers arrived at work.