As Boohoo mulls a breakup, why is the retailer underperforming?

Yougov’s chief executive Steve Hatch takes a closer look at the data behind the biggest stories in business

Boohoo recently announced the departure of its CEO John Lyttle – and a potential business restructure that might see the brand sell Debenhams and Karen Millen to retrain its focus on younger consumers. With much analysis of Boohoo’s strategy contextualised against Shein, we used YouGov BrandIndex data to see how it actually stacks up next to the competition.

A look at ‘impression’ scores, which measure overall sentiment towards a brand, shows that Boohoo (-5.6) is more disliked than liked, although the public are significantly better-disposed towards it than they are Shein (-18.9). Both brands are some way off the average for the high street fashion sector (11.1).

The public are broadly negative about Boohoo, and they don’t think it represents good quality either. With scores of -12.2, its products are considered of a better standard than those made by Shein (-27.3), but fall well short of the average (12.4). It fares better when it comes to ‘value for money’ scores (-1.7, next to Shein’s -2.3) but still underperforms next to the average fashion brand (3.9).

The bigger problem emerges when we look at ‘consideration’ scores, which ask the public which brands they’d choose from a list when they are next in the market to buy clothes. For Boohoo, these scores sit at 5.0; for Shein, 9.8; for high street fashion brands in general, 9.3. So despite the public believing Shein to be a worse brand than Boohoo in many respects, they’re still more likely to think about buying from it.

This may illustrate some of the problems facing high street fast fashion incumbents in the wake of even cheaper, even faster retailers. Could brands like Boohoo and H&M find themselves occupying an unenviable territory between premium and value clothing retailers – more expensive than Shein and Temu, but not quite meeting the standards of higher-end brands? With this in mind, Boohoo’s decision to cut Debenhams and Karen Millen and focus on 18-34 year olds – who have higher ‘consideration’ (9.3) scores for the brand – might make sense.