Coinciding with the ending of Kate Moss and Jamie Hince’s honeymoon on Sir Philip Green’s yacht – and with Kate Moss’s Topshop collections now history – Retail Week Knowledge Bank has been undertaking the more prosaic exercise of updating its Arcadia and Bhs profiles in the wake of the financial marriage of these high-profile institutions of UK retailing.

Although separate figures have unfortunately not been available for the past decade, everything suggests Topshop continues to do well. Anecdotal evidence of enthusiastic mid- and late-teen shoppers known to Retail Week Knowledge Bank’s researchers lends credence to Topshop’s ongoing success.

However, analysing the corporate whole reveals Arcadia’s more mainstream brands’ performances of late have been mundane, with modest sales performances.

Adding Bhs’s space – raising the combined UK group sales area by some three quarters to more than 10 million sq ft – has offered the opportunity to boost those brands’ sales with their introduction as in-house concessions into the hitherto under-invested, under-performing Bhs stores, where sales densities had fallen below £150 per sq ft. This compares with over double that averaged across the Arcadia brands – still fairly modest but which will be notably more again for Topshop.

Arcadia’s current 2010/11 year, ending next month, is particularly important for the group, with the Bhs space hopefully having had time to begin working potentially much harder to the considerable, longer-term advantage of all Arcadia brands. Most of these have been largely becalmed in recent years, while the competition – notably value retailers like Primark, superstores, TK Maxx, Asos and new young fashion multiples – has been increasing collective market share.

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