More than just meatballs....

West End retailers are reporting a big surge in sales of products from Scandinavia, with  a 400% YOY increase and 20% sq footage increase, boosting sales. Homeware, food and clothing from the region are now worth an estimated £300m a year.
Trend experts attribute the surge in popularity to our increased demand for functional, stylish, and sustainable products in these straitened times! Reliable Scandinavian favourites such as H&M and Ikea have paved the ground work for the love affair by introducing us to Scandinavian products, but some of the new names performing well in central London include Cos Skandium, BoConcept, Day Birger, and have the potential to be just as big.

And you thought it was just Meatballs and Loganberry jam!

The un-stoppable WALMART

Research commissioned by WPP on the world's top 100 most valuable brands has determined that the mighty Walmart is the world's most valuable retail brand. WPP top global brands .
The top 10 retail brands are listed below.

Unsuprisingly yet a little depressingly, 6 of these are the hypermarket/discount retailers (Walmart, Tesco, Carrefour, Target, Aldi and Auchan) which have changed the face of high streets and town centres around the globe. The other four include the two online giants - EBay and Amazon, and the hugely successful European fashion brands H&M and Zara.

The most successful global brands are those which one would expect provide the best justification to customers for their purchase. Looking at this list suggests that this justification is mostly based on reliably being the cheapest and most widely distributed purveyor of said goods rather than much else (with the exception perhaps of the two clothing brands which are both known for being reliably fashion forward in addition to very price competitive) which perhaps is somewhat inevitable, particularly in the challenged economic environment we still find ourselves in.

Peter Walshe, global brand director at Millward Brown adds that 'As shopping becomes more of a multi-channel experience with customers comparing prices in-store and online, retail brands will also need to ensure consistent online and offline shopping experiences'. This is a point I have made in the past, and will become increasingly important as online shopping continues to grow- to succeed, retail brands will need to take great care to replicate the values which encourage their customers to shop with them, across all platforms they trade upon, to ensure customers continue to trust them with their purchases.

Most valuable global retail brands

Rank Brand, Value, Change vs. 2009


13 Walmart $39,421m -4%

15 Amazon $27,459m 29%

17 Tesco $25,741m 12%

42 Carrefour $14,980m 0%

62 Target $12,148m -1%

63 H&M $12,131m 1%

76 Ebay $9,328m -28%

80 Zara $8,986m 4%

83 Aldi $9,328m 1%

96 Auchan $7,848m n/a

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...