Fashion lifts sales performance at John Lewis

Fashion was a strong performing category at John Lewis over the Christmas trading period with sales in the category up 8.4% in the week ending 30 December.

This strong post-Christmas performance for fashion came on the back of another stellar week in the run-up to Christmas, when fashion sales were up 8.8% for week ending 23 December.

Overall sales for the department store were down -0.4% to £137.9m in the week ending 30 December, a result which it said had been affected by snowfall in parts of the country. Fashion nonetheless maintained its pre-Christmas momentum for the week, while homewares were down -4.5% and electricals and home technology were down -5.4%.

Earlier today bellwether retailer Next revealed that it had achieved better than expected pre-Christmas sales with full-price sales up 1.5%, however this was down to a strong performance from its online division as retail sales were down.