The French Fashion Retail Benchmark

What's inside

Every fashion retailer in France files its accounts, and almost nobody has compiled them for this sector. This benchmark reads 1,954 French fashion retail and wholesale companies from the public registry and reports medians and quartiles by vertical. No company is named, and no figure is modelled or extrapolated.

• Net margin by vertical — 2.8% at the median in apparel and buying groups, 2.5% in sports, 1.9% in footwear, with the full quartile spread for each.
• The first quartile — one footwear retailer in four filed a loss or the barest of profits (Q1 at -0.4%), and apparel's first quartile sits at 0.2%.
• Store productivity against network size — median networks cluster between 32 and 37 stores across every vertical, while revenue per store ranges from EUR 533k to EUR 941k. Same scale, 1.8x the throughput.
• The method and the limits — the four rules applied before publication (minimum sample size, the ten-store floor, zeros excluded, no names), and the four things this data structurally cannot tell you.

Who it's for

CEOs, CFOs and the merchandising, retail and supply-chain leaders of French fashion networks. They need a defensible external reference point: a board pack, a budget discussion, a target-setting exercise.

Why it matters

At 2.8% net margin, one point of revenue is more than a third of the year's net income. The distance from the median to the third quartile is worth the entire result twice over. That spread is not explained by size or vertical: median network size is nearly identical everywhere. It is explained by the decisions that repeat — allocation, replenishment, markdown timing — which is the one variable still open this season.