Black Friday: Retailers bet on health and beauty sales as experts warn 2025 will be much tougher

UK retailers are making Black Friday bets on health and beauty products as they gear up for the crucial sales period.

This year’s pre-Christmas sale, which falls on 29 November, could spur shoppers to splurge more than last year, analysts say, as wages will soon be given a boost and taxes on shoppers have not risen. One forecast suggests sales of £9bn for the Friday and the following weekend.

At the same time, high street shops will be looking to make the most of the festive period before taxes unveiled in last month’s Budget begin to bite them.

Retail analyst Maureen Hinton said that retailers like John Lewis have been focusing on health technology including gadgets like the £349 Oura ring, a piece of jewellery which can gather sleep, stress and fitness data.

Meanwhile, high-end fragrance brands like Dior have launched exclusive perfume lines commanding higher prices which high street shops are banking on for better margins, she said.

“The budget is really going to hit next year. My view is from the consumer point of view, they see that they’re going to get higher wages,” she said. “I think that this Black Friday and Christmas, is going to be fairly good for retailers,” Ms Hinton said.

The minimum wage for a 21-year-old rises to £12.21 from April, up 6.7 per cent, while the government has kept income tax and other person taxes level, which may give shoppers a confidence boost.

The cost of living crisis has also eased, with inflation at 2.3 per cent compared to 4.6 per cent a year ago and 11.1 per cent in 2022. Prices are still rising and consumers still feel squeezed, but things don’t appear to be getting worse.

But businesses face bruising tax increases, particularly retailers and other businesses which hire a lot of people. Before this happens, they are aiming for healthy sales.

From next year, they will pay £2.33bn more in business national insurance contributions, according to the British Retail Consortium.

Richard Lim of Retail Economics, is a little more cautious, as he points out wages have grown slower than expenses in recent years.

For stores, “it’s still tough conditions, but it has improved significantly over the last couple of years. So people are feeling more confident. We do think that they will spend, but they are looking for value.

“Christmas can be the make or break for some retailers and depending on the product category, for example, for toys, 80 per cent of annual sales for some categories of toys happen in the final three months of the year. It’s a super-important part of the retail calendar for retailers to get right.”

He thinks a big theme will be second-hand goods as more buyers embrace marketplaces like Vinted for music, books and clothes.

“There’s a lot of momentum behind second-hand products for many different reasons. The stigma attached to buying second-hand is now non-existent.”

Much of how the High Street will fare is down to how savvy they have been in stocking the goods that people want with keen pricing, he said, as well as avoiding any stocking problems that have blighted previous years after Covid factory shutdowns.

Black Friday began in the US, as the pre-Christmas rush to buy presents after Thanksgiving.

What started off as a derogatory label for the chaos of shopping around the festive season was seized upon by retailers as a time to offer a discount and lure in shoppers. It arrived in the UK around 2010 and became mainstream three years later.

Prior to that shops held off on sales until the new year. In recent years, it has spread throughout November.