Promotional activity during Christmas drove consumer spending at beauty and health-care retailer Clicks, despite aggressive discounting elsewhere in the retail sector. The group, which released its trading update for the 20 weeks to January 15 on Thursday, said group turnover grew 8.6% to R10bn, while retail sales rose 12.2% and 8.5% in comparable stores, with selling price inflation averaging 5.3%. CEO David Kneale said the company had always been a promotions-orientated retailer and that consumers responded well to promotions in health and beauty. "We’ve become famous for the three-for-two [offer] and we didn’t do any more discounting than we had planned to do. "We set out with a strong value offer ... we also anticipated that if customers aren’t buying gifts, they will still buy lipstick and they will still buy fragrance and suncare [products], which they did," said Kneale. Clicks owns brands such as The Body Shop, Claires and music retailer Musica. The Clicks pharmaceutical whol...
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