What you need to know
Selling shoes in France has changed enormously in recent years as non-specialists have captured a larger share of spending. Sports retailers are benefitting from the popularity of casual and athletic footwear, fashion retailers have focused on developing their footwear offer and online retailers, both specialists and generalists, have captured a large share of spending.
Spending on footwear of all kinds was valued at €9.4 billion in 2018, only 1.5% higher than in 2014. The specialists sector has seen traditional operators squeezed by the non-specialists, and an already fragmented market has been breaking up yet further. Indebtedness at the largest retail group, Vivarte, has forced it to sell or try to sell off all its footwear operations piecemeal, bar the La Halle chain. We have also seen two acquisitions blending online pureplayers with store-based retailers as businesses seek to gain scale online: Sarenza/Monoprix and Spartoo/André.
Areas covered in this report
This report covers the footwear market in France, with a focus on footwear specialists.
The report does not cover non-specialists, such as department stores, in detail although these are covered briefly in the Channels of Distribution section and also in our consumer research.
The report combines analysis of the market in France, including market sizes, specialists’ sales and forecasts, along with our in-depth consumer data, which analyses shoppers’ behaviour.
For the consumer research we asked questions on the following topics:
Which retailers had been used for footwear shopping, in-store and online
Agreement with a variety of attitude statements towards shopping for footwear.
For the purpose of this report, Mintel has used the following definitions:
Consumer spending: The total amount spent by French households (including sales tax) through all retail channels – both specialist and non-specialist. This covers all footwear categories, including trainers, but excludes game-specific footwear (e.g. football boots, ski-boots) and orthopaedic footwear.
Retail sales: Total sales of all types of footwear (excluding sales tax) via stores and directly to the consumer by specialist retailers of footwear. It includes online sales of these retailers where the majority of sales are in bricks and mortar outlets.
Channels of distribution: Mintel estimates of the proportions of spending on footwear via other channels, including the grocers, mixed goods retailers and non-store retailers.
