1. Clothing / apparel sales and market concentration in Germany
Retail sales in the German clothing / apparel segment have only recently started to recover from a year-long decline. In 2008, nominal clothing & textile sales stood at € 56 billion. A decade earlier, they had amounted to € 61.2 billion. The overall share of clothing & textile expenses in private German household expenditures has constantly decreased over the last few years, now representing approx. 4 - 5 percent of the total budget. While above figures include both clothing and textiles, the diagram on the left shows only clothing sales in the major categories.
One major driver for the sales decline can be seen in the disappearance of small traditional clothing retailers and a widespread presence of retail chains such as C&A, H&M, Peek & Cloppenburg etc. As can be seen from the following table, companies with net sales higher than € 100 million (of which there are 26) represent 46 percent of the total clothing market volume in Germany.
| Size category (€ million) |
Number of companies | Net sales (€ billion) |
| less than 0.5 | 23,200 | 3.3 |
| 0.5 to 5 | 3,800 | 4.7 |
| 5 to 25 | 310 | 3.1 |
| 25 to 100 | 50 | 2.3 |
| more than 100 | 25 | 11.6 |
| Total | 27,385 | 25 |
2. Vertical retailers
Especially so-called "vertical clothing retailers" (mono-label retailers) have achieved a strong market position in Germany, i.e. retailers who only sell their own clothing and no clothing of well-known brands. Examples include, C&A, H&M, S.Oliver, Esprit, and Zara. On the contrary, Peek & Cloppenburg (and its store brand Ansons which aims at a younger target group) is usually considered to be a multi-brand or multi-label clothing retailer which sells e.g. Hugo Boss, Armani, Brax, Burberry, Gardeur, and Seidensticker. Besides vertical (or "mono-brand") and multi-brand retailers, there are two other major formats in Germany. First, German department store operators Karstadt and Kaufhof have a strong emphasis on clothing, with a mixture of brands and private labels. Second, clothing discounters have expanded significantly in Germany, offering items at very low prices. Retailers in this format include Kik, Takko, NKD, and Vögele.
3. Partnerships between suppliers and retailers
Due to strong pressures from private labels, vertical retailers and discount formats, clothing suppliers have started partnerships with multi-brand retailers and department stores. Besides other factors, their aim is to take more control of the point-of-sale presentation and sales activities of their brands. Better customer contacts and a more frequent change of collections are additional reasons. Such partnerships have risen considerably over the last few years - from 42,660 in 2007 to 45,700 in 2008. Among them are some variations, with shop-in-shop solutions being the most popular ones. There are also examples of concessions, i.e. suppliers merely renting sales space from the retailer and installing their own shelves and even employing their own staff. A growing number of suppliers have also launched their own shops throughout Germany (e.g. Adidas, Gerry Weber).
