Shop Talk: Shein shines in a lacklustre February
Shop Talk is a newsletter highlighting the main observations from the Insights spending dashboards. These dashboards are sent to subscribers monthly; they track the spending of 22seven’s c56,000 users at grocery, apparel and general retailers.
We recently made some changes to our dashboards. We will now be sharing the data as a monthly series, instead of a three-month average, to help subscribers identify inflection points in company performance. We have also merged the grocery and online grocery data into a single dashboard, which allows subscribers to easily disaggregate a retailer’s performance between its in-store and online channels. We’ll be implementing the same change with our other dashboards next month.
Before we get to the main theme of this month’s Shop Talk, here are two interesting charts from the new, improved Grocery Dashboard. The first shows the important role that Sixty60 has played in sustaining Checkers’ long period of spending share gains among 22seven users; the second shows that Sixty60 makes up 19% of all user spending at Checkers, whereas on-demand services from PnP and Woolworths make up only 3% and 4% of their user spending respectively. The latter figures help to contextualise just how far ahead Sixty60 is in relation to its peers.
Now, onto this month’s main theme… Shop Talk alternates commentary between the various spending categories covered by the Insights dashboards. This month we’re focusing on trends in user spending at apparel retailers.
Spending highlights from the Apparel Dashboard
Cautious to not read too much into February…In addition to being the shortest month, February has also accounted for the lowest proportion of annual apparel spending by 22seven users over the past five years. February attracts 6.1% of annual spending and accounts for only 73% of the average monthly contribution.
In fact, when you look at the first three months of the year combined, they mark a relatively slow combined period for clothing retailers, totalling only 21% of the total value of user spending for the year. By comparison, the last three months of the year account for 31% of total annual user spend (a 50% increase).
Strong gains for MRP as Superbalist starts slowlyTaking into account the above point, MRP (excluding Power Fashion & Yuppiechef) delivered the biggest gain in spending share over the past three months among 22seven users.
Superbalist, on the other hand, has stumbled after its spending share peaked in November. But if you look back at the last four years, their spending share has always been at its lowest during the first quarter. Taking the historical data into account, we therefore interpret Superbalist’s weak start to 2022 as being part of a similar cycle.
Shein takes off 22seven user purchases at the online Chinese clothing retailer Shein (SHE-in) increased massively in February. Its rise has been nothing short of meteoric. During the course of the the month, its spending share surpassed more established peers like PnP Clothing, CottonOn and Zara.
Shein’s spending share is highest among users in the R25-40k pm income bracket, and higher in Gauteng compared to other provinces.
Stay ahead of the gameThat’s it for this month. If you want to know more about data-driven consumer trends in South Africa, sign up to receive Nugget, our bi-weekly newsletter. You can also follow Insights on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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Simon Anderssen[email protected]084 7300 309
Tim Terblanche[email protected]
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