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Channel Check: Bebe Stores (BEBE)

By The Channel Checkers on Tue, 2009-04-21 23:46

Over the past week, we surveyed Bebe (BEBE) locations to gauge trends in the boutique retail market. We asked the following questions: 

  1. How well would you say business is doing at your store?
  2. Do you have any excess inventory of products that will go on sale soon?
  3. What is the average receipt at this store?
  4. What are the top selling items right now?
  • 60% of respondents said that business at their Bebe store was just “average”. 23% did say that business was “above average” while 10% said business was “below average”.
  • 60% said that they did not have any particular excess inventory that would be going on sale in the near future. 40% of respondents said they did citing items such as bags and sunglasses. 50% of all those reporting excess inventory cited bags as being in excess (this was also 17% of all total respondents). 
  • The average customer purchase was reported to be $100.33 with responses here ranging from $45 to $300.
  • Dresses and jeans were seen as the top selling category of clothes according to 20% of respondents each. 17% of respondents saw tank tops as the top selling item while “tops” were seen as the top item by an additional 17% (it might be fair to say “tops” as a category were the strongest with 34% of respondents if we combined the previous two answers).
Conclusion of Channel Check:  We generally view responses about business levels that are “average” as slightly negative. Given this view, the data does not suggest that Bebe has seen strong sales in the past month. Bags look like an inventory problem on a product basis, but overall inventories to not look too high at Bebe. The average purchase becomes relevant as we measure its changes in coming reports.
 
For access to the underlying survey or for more information, please contact Jason Katz at 415.867.0959 or jason@thechannelcheckers.com.