Fashion IS ON SALE. BUT AT WHAT COST

TFTT Monday Briefing

Think about the last time you saw something you wanted to buy. Perhaps a jacket for £200, a pair of trainers for £150 or a dress for £120. You liked it, you could afford it, but you didn't buy it. Instead, you decided to wait because you suspected that, within a few weeks, the price would come down.

For many consumers, that's become a perfectly normal way to shop. Why pay full price today when there's a reasonable chance of getting 20%, 30% or even 50% off tomorrow? It's a difficult situation for retailers, particularly because parts of the industry have helped create it.

Promotions have become an increasingly important part of fashion retail. Seasonal sales, mid-season events, loyalty offers and, of course, Black Friday. Each has a legitimate commercial purpose, but collectively they've changed the relationship between customers and the price on the ticket. The question is whether parts of the fashion industry have become so reliant on promotions that customers no longer believe the original price is the one they should pay. And as we approach Black Friday, there's another question worth asking. Have we changed the way people shop for Christmas without necessarily making the industry more profitable?

The Reality of Retail in 2026

Before criticising discounting, we need to acknowledge just how difficult the market has become. Retailers are dealing with rising operating costs, pressure on household finances, unpredictable demand and intense competition. For many businesses, promotions aren't simply a marketing exercise. They're a necessary part of managing stock, generating cash and keeping sales moving.

The latest figures illustrate the challenge. According to the Office for National Statistics, UK retail sales volumes fell by 0.4% in September compared with August. Although volumes increased by 0.7% across the third quarter, September proved particularly challenging for parts of the fashion industry, with unusually warm weather affecting demand for autumn and winter clothing. It's an important reminder that retailers can make sensible buying decisions and still find themselves exposed to circumstances beyond their control. Buy too heavily into winter clothing and a warm September leaves you holding stock that isn't moving. Hold back too much and a sudden change in the weather can leave you short of the products customers want.

Consumer confidence is another concern. The latest GfK Consumer Confidence Barometer, powered by NIM, showed confidence falling by 11 points to minus 24 in October. The measure of consumers' willingness to make major purchases also fell by 14 points. That doesn't mean customers have stopped spending, but it does suggest they're becoming more cautious about where their money goes. And when demand becomes harder to secure, discounting is often one of the quickest ways to encourage customers to buy.

Have We Made Full Price Harder to Believe?

There's nothing inherently wrong with a promotion. If a retailer has excess stock, needs to release working capital or wants to attract customers during a quieter trading period, discounting can be exactly the right commercial decision. The problem comes when promotions stop being occasional decisions and become something the business depends on.

Customers are increasingly familiar with the promotional calendar. They know when seasonal sales are approaching, they receive regular discount offers, and they're constantly reminded of opportunities to save. For some brands, that creates a difficult cycle. Customers become less willing to purchase at full price, retailers respond with further promotions, and those promotions reinforce the expectation that waiting will deliver a better deal.

It's not a universal problem. Many successful brands maintain strong full-price businesses, and promotions remain an effective way to attract new customers and manage inventory. But where discounting becomes habitual, rebuilding full-price credibility can be extremely difficult. The immediate commercial impact is relatively straightforward. Reducing the selling price without reducing the product cost puts pressure on gross profit. The longer-term impact is potentially more damaging. If customers repeatedly see products reduced shortly after launch, they may begin to question whether the original price represented genuine value in the first place. And once that confidence disappears, the problem becomes bigger than a single season's trading.

Price and Value Are Not the Same Thing

This is where I think fashion needs to change the conversation. A customer deciding not to spend £150 on a jacket doesn't automatically mean they cannot afford £150. It may simply mean they don't believe that particular jacket is worth the money. Equally, affordability is a very real issue for millions of households. When essential living costs are taking up more of the household budget, discretionary purchases become harder to justify, regardless of how good the product might be. Both things can be true.

But for brands trying to compete beyond price, perceived value has become increasingly important. Customers have access to an enormous amount of choice. They can compare products, research materials, examine reviews and move between retailers in seconds. Simply positioning something as premium doesn't make it premium. The product has to justify its price through quality, design, fit, craftsmanship, functionality or something genuinely distinctive.

And this challenge isn't limited to the middle of the market. Value retailers must continue demonstrating affordability without compromising the proposition customers expect. Mid-market brands need to offer a compelling balance of quality, design and price. Premium and luxury businesses face their own questions about whether increasingly ambitious pricing is supported by genuine product value. Different parts of the market face different challenges, but the underlying principle is the same. Customers need a reason to believe the product is worth what they're being asked to pay. Discounting can encourage a purchase. It cannot, on its own, create a compelling product proposition.

Has Black Friday Changed Christmas?

There's another part of this discussion that deserves more attention. Has Black Friday fundamentally changed the way consumers shop for Christmas? Traditionally, December was the critical Christmas shopping period. Retailers built towards the festive season, with customers purchasing gifts and seasonal products in the weeks leading up to Christmas. That calendar has changed.

Black Friday is no longer simply a single promotional day towards the end of November. For many retailers, it's become an extended promotional period, with offers appearing weeks before the event itself. Research published by Which? ahead of Black Friday 2025 highlighted how several major UK retailers had begun promotional campaigns in late October, with some offers continuing into December. What was once a day has increasingly become a season.

From a consumer's perspective, this makes sense. If you know what you're buying for Christmas and believe you'll get a better price in November, why wait until December? But from a retailer's perspective, it raises a more complicated question. Are these promotions generating additional spending, or simply bringing forward purchases customers would have made anyway?

The distinction matters. If a retailer attracts new customers, takes market share from competitors or sells products that might otherwise remain unsold, Black Friday can deliver genuine commercial value. But if an existing customer simply buys in November at a discounted price instead of purchasing the same product at full price in December, the retailer may have brought revenue forward while sacrificing margin. Of course, not every November purchase would otherwise have happened in December, and not every promotional sale comes at the expense of full-price demand. But the wider question remains. Has Black Friday expanded the Christmas shopping opportunity, or has it changed when customers spend the same money?

What Last Christmas Told Us

The figures from 2025 make this particularly interesting. According to BDO's High Street Sales Tracker, like-for-like sales across discretionary retail categories increased by 3.4% in November 2025 compared with the previous year. At first glance, that sounds encouraging. However, the growth came against a weak November 2024, and BDO noted that the increase remained below inflation.

More revealing was the performance during Black Friday week itself. Despite widespread promotional activity, like-for-like sales grew by just 0.38% compared with the equivalent week a year earlier. For an event that generates so much marketing activity, operational preparation and promotional investment, that is hardly evidence of exceptional growth.

December didn't provide the recovery retailers had hoped for either. BDO subsequently reported that like-for-like sales across discretionary retail categories fell by 1.4% in December 2025 compared with December 2024. These figures come from BDO's participating retail businesses rather than representing total UK retail sales, and they don't establish a direct relationship between Black Friday and December performance. Consumer confidence, inflation, weather, product availability and wider economic conditions all influence spending.

But the figures do raise an important question. If retailers are discounting heavily throughout November and still struggling to generate meaningful sales growth, is the promotional strategy delivering what the industry needs? And if customers increasingly expect the best prices before December, what does that mean for the profitability of the traditional Christmas trading period?

Black Friday clearly works for some retailers, products and customers. The question is whether it creates enough additional profitable demand to justify the investment and pressure on margins. Moving Christmas spending into November isn't necessarily the same as growing it.

The Commercial Challenge Ahead

As retailers prepare for the Golden Quarter, the pressure to deliver sales will be considerable. And understandably so. Businesses have stock commitments, operating costs, cash flow requirements and financial targets to meet. A strong promotional period can make a meaningful difference to the performance of an entire season.

But measuring success purely through sales growth risks overlooking the bigger commercial picture. Retailers need to understand how much of their promotional revenue represents genuinely additional demand, how much comes from existing customers purchasing earlier, and whether the resulting sales deliver an acceptable return. They also need to consider the impact on future customer behaviour.

If a business becomes increasingly dependent on promotions to generate demand, it can find itself competing on price rather than the strength of its product or brand. That's a difficult position to reverse. The answer isn't necessarily fewer promotions. It's better commercial discipline around when, why and how they're used.

That means understanding inventory, protecting full-price opportunities where possible, managing distribution and ensuring that promotional decisions support the wider business rather than simply delivering a short-term sales target. Because ultimately, the objective shouldn't be to generate the highest possible sales figure at any cost. It should be to build a commercially sustainable business.

TFTT Insider Perspective

Having spent years working across fashion brands, retail, wholesale and international distribution, one thing becomes very clear: the decisions that look straightforward from the outside are rarely straightforward inside the business.

It's easy to criticise discounting. It's considerably harder when you're responsible for the stock, the cash flow, the people and the financial performance. Sometimes the right decision is to protect full price. Sometimes it's to take the margin hit, release cash and move on. The important thing is understanding the consequences of both.

But I do think the industry needs to ask itself whether we've allowed the promotional calendar to dictate too much of the way we operate. Black Friday has undoubtedly changed retail. Customers plan around it, brands invest heavily in it, and retailers increasingly build their trading strategies around an event that has expanded well beyond a single day. The question is whether that change has genuinely strengthened the businesses participating in it.

If we're simply encouraging customers to buy earlier at lower prices, without generating enough additional profitable demand, we need to question what we're achieving. And that brings us back to the wider issue of value.

The strongest fashion businesses are not necessarily those offering the biggest discounts. They're the ones that understand their customers, develop products people genuinely want, manage their inventory effectively and give consumers a compelling reason to buy.

Promotions will always have a place in fashion. They should. But they need to support the business, not become the reason the business survives.

As we approach Black Friday and Christmas, perhaps the industry should spend less time celebrating how much it's selling and more time understanding what those sales are actually delivering. Because moving more product doesn't automatically mean building a stronger business.

And if customers are increasingly waiting for the next discount, the question we should be asking isn't how much further we can reduce the price. It's what we need to do to make them believe in the full price again.

TFTT | Inside Fashion, Not Observing It.