Sales of school supplies saw a ‘significant decline’ before the start of the school year, due to inflation but also an older tendency to reuse products bought in previous years, according to the professional organization of manufacturers AIPB and the GFK panelist on Friday.
The GFK panelist measured “a significant decline in sales during the back-to-school season”, with a turnover of 357 million euros between June 26 and Sunday August 27, corresponding to a drop of 5.2% compared to the previous year, he detailed during a press conference. Knowing that in the meantime the average price of an item has increased by 8.7%, from 2.9 euros to 3.16 euros, the drop in sales is even more marked in terms of the number of items sold: 113 million units sold, a decline of 12.8%. The president of the Association of Stationery and Office Industrialists (AIPB) Nadège Helary nevertheless qualified the observation by recalling that the start of the school year will be held on September 4 and that the weeks not yet measured by GFK will be “decisive”.
School supplies: child influencers, a gold mine for brands
“We are still positive about the results we will have in the next fortnight, customers go to stores and continue to buy branded products,” said Nadège Helary, also general manager of Staedtler France. Magali Saint-Laurent, of GFK, indicated that half of the sales over ten weeks were made during the last four.
In addition to the “unprecedented pressure on the budget” of households, the drop in sales is also the result of a “democratization of the reasoned purchase of consumers, who tend to take inventory of supplies” purchased previously to “reuse them “, Observed during a videoconference Samuel Gimenez, of GFK. The complete report of sales during this return to school 2023 “will be available at the end of October”, further specified the panelist.
