Clothing retail goes from price cuts to more price cuts

The legal sales period is over, but stickers promising “Two products for the price of one,” “Everything for half the price,” and “The Winter Collection, almost for free” still feature in shop windows. All this because the owners have not been able to sell all their merchandise. Clothing and footwear retailers started the promotional season as early as in December, for fear of being stuck with merchandise stocks, however, they were unable to sell their entire winter collections. The consumers’ reluctance to buy has been strongly felt over the last few months, with sales in clothing and footwear stores falling by up to 30%. The first solution found has been to pursue an aggressive promotional campaign, which has been going on for three months. With the Easter holidays coming soon, and in view of the stores’ subsequent effort to get rid of items in the spring-summer collection, shopping centres could come up with a concept similar to that used by outlet stores, where prices of products, (predominantly from past collections), are 30% lower than the initial prices, for the entire duration of the year.