Tesco’s interim results on Thursday —as usual — didn’t major on clothing sales, but did contain a few nuggets that show fashion turnover is rising.

The UK’s dominant supermarkets operator said that overall group sales in the first half of its 2024/25 financial year rose 3.5% to £31.463 billion. Adjusted operating profit was up 15.6% at £1.649 billion and statutory profit after tax rose 13.1% at a little over £1 billion.

While food is by far the biggest part of the company’s massive business, it also has a significant operation in Home and Clothing. 

For this, sales grew by 0.3%, which includes a 1.3ppts drag from the transition to its new partnership with The Entertainer.  This focuses on toys and means the company is no longer recognising product sales but earns commission income. 

Excluding this impact, Home and Clothing sales grew by 1.6%, “primarily driven by a strong clothing performance, where we continue to grow ahead of the broader store-based clothing market”.   

While the UK accounts for the biggest chunk of Tesco’s sales, it also has significant operations in central Europe and here it says that like for like sales grew by just 0.6% with non-food sales down 1.7%. This included an impact from “market-wide availability challenges in clothing, and wetter weather in the second quarter, which was partly offset by an increase in the proportion of full price sales year-on-year”.

Those full-price sales and the positive performance for clothing in the UK market underline why reports suggest that the company is boosting its fashion operations by widening their availability.

There have been reports that the F&F clothing offering will be back on the retailer’s webstore later this year in the wake of Tesco’s marketplace launch.

It amounts to a clothing relaunch at the firm after F&F went offline in 2018.

The company has clearly seen other retail peers in the UK market powering ahead with fashion sales online (M&S as well as other supermarkets being very good examples), and realises that mass-market fashion shoppers are now fully attuned to the convenience of e-shopping.

Given that fashion isn’t yet available online for the company, those shoppers are also obviously happy to buy in-store as well so it’s a best-of-both-worlds situation for the company.