You always need more cushions: H&M extends its range to Homewares....

Retail Week reports today that H&M intends to extend its reach to Homewares with a range of living room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen to be launched in the UK...

Although the retailer's sales grew by an impressive 15% last year, LFL sales had slowed, so this venture presents a new opportunity for growth in the coming year, and is likely to compete with the likes of fellow fashion retailers Next and Zara who have both enjoyed success selling home furnishings in addition to their fashion offering.

Whilst this may come as a little bit of a surprise to those who assumed that a value/volume retailer like H&M would want to concentrate on what it does best, I think we will see more of this in the year to come i.e. fashion retailers diversifying and broadening their product offering to incorporate homewares.

There has been a noticeable trend for more fashionability in home furnishings in recent times- gone are the days where bed linen and cushion choices offered limited choice and limited opportunity to channel one's inner 'interior designer'. These days we more commonly see fashion magazines and style supplements regularly featuring stylish modern homewares, and new home trends. Of course there are already a plethora of home style magazines featuring increasingly trend driven spreads, such as the 'boutique hotel' style beloved of those homemakers who bow at the throne of interior design deities such as Kelly Hoppen... And yet there is still a definite gap in the market for trendy credible home furnishing at high street prices.

So this market offers a great opportunity for fashion retailers to broaden their range, and thus their potential sales, whilst grabbing market share from less forward-thinking competitors, using their existing retail and fashion expertise in a slightly new way.

Fashion retailers succeed when they have an unbeatable eye for future trends, a keen design eye, an innate sense of appropriate pricing, and a speedy and efficient supply chain to bring the correct volume of  products to market quickly. Where they can already do that, cushions and bed linen will be a easy win...