Weak Christmas? What weak Christmas? UK health & beauty giant Superdrug has joined a growing band of UK retailers reporting strong festive season sales. And its outlook for 2025 is positively glowing.

The high street retailer hailed Christmas trading as its “best ever” after sales rose by more than 5% in the final weeks of 2024. What’s more, sales rocketed 21% year on year online.

The success follows particular strong annual trading figures released last summer.

Superdrug said its festive performance was boosted by one gift-set being sold every second throughout December. Own brand top sellers included the Studio London Ultimate Brush Collection, the Vitamin E Complete Daily Skincare Set, Extracts Body Bumper Pack and the Fruity Candyfloss Bumper Pack.

Chief executive Peter Macnab said: “We’re proud of these results and want to thank our customers for their continued loyalty to Superdrug as we continue our mission to be as accessible as possible when it comes to high-quality beauty and health.”

Importantly, he added: “2025 will be an exciting year for us as we continue to enhance our in-store experience and invest in our Only At Superdrug product innovations and exclusives, to give customers reasons to keep returning to Superdrug.”

The Christmas trading results come on the back of Superdrug’s annual results in July that saw a double-digit revenue uplift and “soaring profits driven by strong retail store sales and volume growth” during 2023.

For the year, it saw sales rise 11.8% to £1.528 billion and its market share also grew for the third consecutive year. It reached 10.6% having been 8.9% as recently as 2020. The company said volume sales rose 4.2%.

The robust results were helped, as mentioned, by “strong retail store performance, increased sales volume and continued own brand growth”.

The company’s pre-tax earnings also jumped 43% to £111.6 million. Although Superdrug didn’t give a net profit figure, operating profit rose from £88.4 million to £121.9 million and the operating margin was up to 8% from 6.5% a year ago.