US Apparel and Beauty Spending Tracker: May 2022

The Coresight Research US Apparel and Beauty Spending Tracker provides a monthly update on the trajectory of consumer spending on beauty, clothing and footwear. The data presented in this report refer to consumer spending through any channel and so differ from retail sales data, which include product category sales by type of retailer. The year-over-year changes that are the focus of this report are inferred from US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) data. Clothing and Footwear Spending Update Consumer spending on clothing and footwear remained solid in May 2022, against strong comparatives. Shoppers upped their spending by 4.0% year over year, lower than April’s revised 4.9% growth but higher than March’s revised 3.5% growth. We believe that price rises were the major growth driver of the total spending on apparel and footwear in May 2022, with volumes down slightly.

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Figure 1. US Consumer Spending on Clothing and Footwear (YoY % Change) [caption id="attachment_150601" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Expenditure data are seasonally adjusted
Source: BEA/Coresight Research[/caption]   Clothing and Footwear Spending by Subcategory We track four subcategories of clothing and footwear: footwear, children’s and infants’ clothing, men’s and boys’ clothing, and women’s and girls’ clothing. Against very strong comparatives (65.4% growth in the same month last year), spending on clothing overall saw a year-over-year increase of 5.2% in May, lower than the revised 6.3% growth in April. Figure 2 shows spending on clothing by category type. Category sales growth followed the same growth pattern as clothing overall, with a peak in April 2021, followed by solid growth from May 2021 to May 2022.

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Figure 2. US Consumer Spending on Clothing by Category (YoY % Change) [caption id="attachment_150602" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Source: BEA/Coresight Research[/caption]   Year-over-year growth in spending on footwear was 0.4% in May, versus 1.0% growth in April.

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Figure 3. US Consumer Spending on Footwear (YoY % Change) [caption id="attachment_150603" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Source: BEA/Coresight Research[/caption]   Beauty Spending Update Our tracker follows the US BEA definition of the beauty category, including bath products, cosmetics, nail products and tools and perfumes. Consumer spending on beauty increased by 6.3% year over year in May, higher than the 4.2% growth seen in April. Spending on beauty recovered quickly amid the pandemic and has seen positive year-over-year growth since July 2020.

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Figure 4. US Consumer Spending on Selected Beauty Categories (YoY % Change) [caption id="attachment_150604" align="aligncenter" width="700"] The beauty category is defined as bath products, cosmetics, nail products and tools and perfumes
Source: BEA/Coresight Research[/caption]