This is the latest instalment in a new partner series with The Retail Score, presenting a first-of-its-kind Fashion Retail Index that tracks top-line performance across the clothing, footwear and accessories industry.
The Index draws on anonymised data from thousands of fashion retail stores, tracking total and like-for-like sales across the industry as well as across four channels: Standalone stores, Outlet stores, Online and Concessions. Like-for-like figures strip out sales from any recently opened or closed stores, isolating genuine trading performance from the effect of network changes.
The series begins with a look at May 2026.
May delivered a positive +2.2% sales growth versus last year, the strongest month the Index has recorded since last October. That figure marks a sharp break from the pattern set earlier in the quarter: March delivered just 0.7% growth and April only 1.1%, meaning May's result was roughly double April's and more than three times March's. Two months of near-flat performance gave way, almost without warning, to the best result in eight months.
That kind of jump rarely comes from a single driver and the underlying data bears that out.
What makes May distinctive isn't just the headline number but its composition. The growth was driven by a lift in both sales transactions and unit volume, the first time this year the Index has recorded improvement on both measures at once. Earlier in the year, any gains tended to show up in one metric while the other stayed flat or softened, a pattern often associated with fewer shoppers buying more per visit, or more visits with smaller baskets. May broke that trade-off.
More transactions and more units moving simultaneously points to broader-based demand across the customer base, not just intensified spending from an already-engaged core.
Channel data, however, tells a more uneven story. Online was the standout performer, up 5.8% and effectively carrying the industry's overall result on its own. Standalone stores grew a comparatively modest 1.4%, while Outlet (0.7%) and Concessions (0.1%) were considerably softer again.
The spread between the strongest and weakest channels, roughly 5.7 percentage points, is wide enough to suggest this wasn't a uniform recovery in consumer confidence but a shift concentrated in one part of the market. If physical retail were genuinely rebounding, the four channels would likely be moving closer together; instead, the gap between digital and bricks-and-mortar widened.
That divergence matters for how the +2.2% headline should be read. A result this strong, arrived at through one channel doing most of the work, is a different story to the same number generated evenly across the board. The underlying data shows significant discounting took place across May, and the scale of that activity is a plausible contributor to online's outsized share of the month's growth, given how responsive digital sales tend to be to promotional pricing.
Whether that discounting was concentrated in the online channel specifically, and what it means for margins, is the question The Retail Score will examine in next month's release.
A note from our sponsor: The Retail Score Index is open for all retailers to participate in. Those retailers who agree to share data with the Retail Score get the benefit of data updated weekly, every Monday evening. The data contains a broad range of measures that extend well beyond basic sales data and reports across multiple location segments, including postcode.
Visit The Retail Score or email them at enquiry@theretailscore.com to learn more.