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Two UK Brands That Aren’t Gonna Make It
The world’s moved on and they... haven’t
Tim Vollans
November 29, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
💡 The Lightbulb
Two UK Brands That Aren’t Gonna Make It
The world’s moved on and they haven’t
The first one is less controversial than the second…
New Look.
They’ve been struggling for years now. Another High Street retailer that hasn’t adapted to the online world.
And they’ve been closing even more UK stores throughout 2023…
Annual revenues have been cut in half since the peak five years ago:
It looks like a matter of time before the inevitable collapse. You know things are bad when even Mike Ashley isn’t interested…
@fink.tok I dont think these two #ukbrands will be around in 3 years time. I want to know what you think! 🧠
Now, the controversial one.
Hamley’s Toys
The world’s oldest toy shop. Founded in 1760, and bought by Reliance Brands (Mukesh Ambani) in 2019.
‘Experiential retail’ has been dead for a long time. And Hamley’s is known as a location rather than a toy brand.
It’s a tourist attraction as much as a toy store.
Ambani wants to change that by opening hundreds of Hamley’s stores across India. Tap into the growing population.
A bold & expensive strategy in an increasingly online world…
🧠 The Big Brain
The consumer is dead again
Back to life, back to reality...
Black Friday sales data got people all frothy, shouting about what it means for the economy.
Nobody could agree what it meant.
Consumers are increasingly using Buy Now Pay Later.
The new narrative is that consumers have maxed out their credit cards and have now moved on to even riskier financing options.
Super scary OMGZ!
Except, it’s really not, once you put the data into context…
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⚡ The Spark
US GDP Growth Revised (Even) Higher
If you thought 4.9% was mad, how about 5.2%
INSANE.
Yes, it’s backwards looking data, but it’s still massively impressive.
However, there’s a little caveat in the update. Consumer spending was revised lower to 3.6% vs the 4% previously estimated.
That’s still pretty healthy, but it’s also an interesting divergence.
This US economic growth positivity has been driven by business investment, government spending, plus residential & private inventory investment.
Company profits are looking healthy…
Some pessimism about the economic outlook is understandable. The best is probably behind us.
That said, the economy is slowing from a very good place, so things might feel worse than they actually are.
Which is why Goldman’s chief economist Jan Hatzius told Odd Lots that sentiment isn’t to be trusted…
Sentiment effects can sort of overstate a weakening of the economy.
I think we've had a couple of instances in 2023 when the sentiment based indicators deteriorated a lot.
And then even within, for example, business surveys, something like general business confidence was significantly weaker than questions that asked about orders or production or employment, which in turn was weaker than what the hard indicators were saying.
And we have in those instances repeatedly put more weight on the hard indicators and I think so far that's turned out to be the right choice.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it many times again in the future. You can’t blindly trust ‘the data’ …