//The move comes as fashion retailers sit on piles of unsold stock due to supply chain issues and a lack of demand for winter clothing
// M&S is “re-adjusting stock flow” by delaying deliveries of orders
Fashion retailers are sitting on piles of unsold clothing due to a hangover of last year’s supply chain delays, and lacklustre demand for current season stock.
An easing of supply chain disruption has led to a pile up of products in warehouses as lead times from east Asia have shortened.
This means that retailers faced with clearing last year’s delayed stock are receiving new stock quicker than expected.
M&S has asked suppliers to postpone deliveries to its warehouses and has delayed finalising its orders for next year.
An M&S spokeswoman told The Sunday Times that, like other retailers, it was “re-adjusting stock flow” as supply chain disruption eased. It is thought these are industry-wide challenges.
M&S, which posted a 4.2% rise in clothing and home sales in the first four weeks of its second half last month, has also resorted to discounting coats, jackets at boots by 20% in a bid to clear excess stock as milder weather combined with shoppers cutting back has led to slow-moving winter clothing.
Subscribe to Retail Gazette for free
Sign up here to get the latest news straight into your inbox each morning
Asos, for example, is sitting on £1.08 billion of unsold stock, up a third on the year before.
Next has returned “a very small” amount of stock to its third party brands although, it told The Sunday Times that its inventory was at planned levels.
Meanwhile, Tesco’s clothing suppliers are preparing for delays after the grocer wrote to them to remind them of its stock holding policies.
Fashion retailers will be hoping that Black Friday, combined with the recent cold spell, has helped clear some inventory.
Sales were up against last year this Black Friday. Barclaycard Payments said that the volume of transactions edged up 3.2% as of 5pm versus last year, while Nationwide said the number of purchases was up 10% across the day.
Click here to sign up to Retail Gazette‘s free daily email newsletter
I’m not surprised at M&S inventory problems along with others. They all have a very slow automate stock systems that automatically generate stock quantities for stores without stores input. Each of there stock systems take 3 to 4 days for the stores to receive that day sales of stock, so stores are always playing catch up and often miss the opportunity for selling. For example Mondays stock won’t arrive until Thursday, Tuesday stock not until Friday and so and so forth (also majority of stores don’t have weekend delivery’s so stock is rolled over until the Monday or following week) yes stores may have daily deliveries but it always minimum of 3 days behind unlike Primark who manually order stock and get it the very next day. Also Primark stores know exactly what they are getting ( unlike their competitors) and are pro active to setting up sales opportunities not reacting further delaying sales.
This would also explain Tescos weekly on and off club card prices on their clothing departments.