Mother’s Day gently boosts health and beauty retail sales

Data reveals that during the month of March, for the first time in 23 months, health and beauty saw positive year-on-year revenue growth for the full month, up by 3%.

As a result of Mother’s Day, many online retail categories experienced significant growth. Gift retailers, as expected, saw an increase in revenue, where weekly revenue shot up to 35.9%. This is the first positive figure in the gift category recorded since March 2022.

While the health and beauty category often experiences turbulence, peaking in some weeks and experiencing sharp falls in others, year-on-year revenue was largely positive in the first two weeks of March (up by 12.3% and 28.8%), and was driven by the subcategories beauty, makeup and fragrance.

Overall, during March 2023, UK online retail saw a 2.2% dip year-on-year in revenue. However, this was significantly better than the year prior, which reported a 26% decrease.

According to the IMRG Online Retail Index – which tracks the online sales of 200 retailers – there was a positive 9.4% month-on-month growth in March from February, attributing Mother’s Day (19th March)  as a large contributor to the success.

Andy Mulcahy, Strategy & Insight Director, IMRG: "The performance online was complicated this month, with the early weeks doing well as Mothers’ Day moved forward, followed by the steepest decline of the year so far (-13.6% YoY) for the after.

"It will continue to be skewed moving into April, as Easter moved forward a week this year and we saw a WoW increase of +15% for the home & garden category for the last week of March whereas there was a decline of -6.2% for the same week in 2022. How that balances out will determine whether April brings any signs of renewal online after a very long period of negative growth."