March and April 2025 M1 Client Performance Overview

One of the most frequent questions we hear at Management One is, “How am I doing compared to my peers?” To help answer, we provide below some highlights of March and April 2025. We chose to combine the two months as Easter has meaningful impact on many of our clients, and the holiday fell in March in 2024 but in April in 2025.

Looking across all clients in our top 10 verticals, sales for the two-month period were flat compared to last year, and inventories were up 4%. 

As usual, performance varied meaningfully by retail vertical and by class of merchandise.  See below for results by vertical for our key groups, with sales growth led by the toy and hobby category.  One callout is that luxury fashion markdowns grew meaningfully, suggesting they were needed to support continued sales growth.  Is the luxury consumer feeling pinched after a long stretch of strong spending?

Management One Client Performance by Vertical from March 1 to April 30, 2025

Regardless of your vertical or your geographic location, remember to check your Retail Orbit data regularly, as consumer sentiment and thus your sales trends may be volatile given the economic policy headlines and the rapidly changing tariff environment.  You’ll also want to keep a particularly close eye on your outstanding purchase orders and your future open to buy, given the turmoil among vendors importing from abroad.

On April 23, we hosted a second webinar on how to respond to tariffs and economic uncertainty. If you missed it, you can watch the recording here.  

Looking at classes of merchandise, a few stood out for their year-over-year sales performance across a wide variety of types of retailer, suggesting broad consumer appeal during March and April:

• Performance footwear

• Fashion jewelry, especially bracelets and necklaces

• Insoles (are consumers more focused on making their existing shoes fit better than they have been?)

• Sweaters - it has indeed been a cold spring

  Within specific retailer types, here are the top performing classes in sales growth for March and April:

Please contact your Retail Expert or your M1 Planning Manager, Adam Hambleton, if you’d like more detail. We can’t share individual client info with other retailers, but we’re always happy to talk about retail data, trends, and how to build a plan that maximizes opportunities and identifies risks.