What you need to know
In recent years, the German economy has been showing consistent growth in real terms, driven mainly by a gradually increasing population, rising domestic spending and low levels of unemployment. Private consumption in the country has kept pace with economic growth and increased 8.3% in constant prices between 2013 and 2018.
Nevertheless, contrary to previous years, consumer spending of clothing actually decreased 0.5% in 2018. In fact, in recent years, the clothing sector in Germany has undergone a transformation, with a considerable share of spending shifting online. This has benefitted online retailers like specialist Zalando and non-specialist Amazon, which have shown tremendous growth in the period.
At the other end of the spectrum, long-established players like C&A, Esprit, Tom Tailor and Wöhrl have had to reduce their store estates in the country considerably, while others like Charles Vögele have disappeared from the market entirely.
Although e-commerce accounted for almost 20% of clothing sales in 2018, there are signs that this shift may be starting to stabilise, with online and offline sales growth becoming more closely aligned over the coming years. As a number of players continue to struggle to adapt to the changes in the market, the ones that seem to be succeeding are those that are finding ways of efficiently combining offline and online and operating as multichannel.
Areas covered in this report
This report covers the clothing retail market in Germany, with a focus on clothing and fashion specialist retailers. The report does not cover non-specialists, such as hypermarkets or department stores, in detail although these are looked at briefly in the consumer research section.
The report combines analysis of the market in Germany, including market sizes, specialists’ sales and forecasts, along with our in-depth consumer data, which analyses shoppers’ behaviour. A number of relevant company profiles are also included.
For our consumer research this year we asked questions on the following topics:
Participation in online and in-store shopping for clothing in the last 12 months
The retailers used for clothing shopping in the last 12 months.
Responses to a series of attitudinal statements relating to shopping for clothing.
For the purpose of this report, Mintel has used the following definitions:
Consumer spending: The total amount spent by German households (including sales tax) on clothing, via all channels, i.e. clothing shops, hypermarkets, online, at markets etc.
Retail sales: total sales of all types of goods and services (excluding sales tax) via stores and directly to the consumer (mainly online) by specialist clothing retailers. It includes online sales of these retailers where the majority of sales are in bricks and mortar outlets.
