In the eye of retail: Holiday takeaways

One of my favorite sources is Retail Eye Partners, an independent equity research and consulting firm, which, among other things, offers up a real-time pulse on the consumer and the performance of specific retailers and brands. The company also has a consumer panel of 400 women that it surveys every month.

Here are the big takeaways from Retail Eye’s latest consumer panel (the comments in blue are from the firm’s principals, Lisa Walters and Sapna Shah):

• Shoppers spent more than they planned to on holiday gifts, so spending rebounded above 2008 levels, likely to have a very positive impact on December sales for most retailers. (We suspect that great deals in stores and online helped to boost spending and consumers ended up doing a little self purchasing as well, given they were able to stretch their budgets further given better-than-expected discounting by retailers.)
• While shoppers didn’t buy for more recipients, they did spend more on each gift. (Again, we believe that hard-to-pass-up pricing and doorbusters made shoppers want to spend.)
• Consumer electronics and gift cards were still hot this year, and gift-card purchasing rose to 2007 levels. (Our store checks show that CE was strong all month long with almost half of our panel buying at least one CE item as a gift this year, and shoppers favoring strong pricing at mass merchants over consumer electronics stores.)
• Mass merchants, off-price and online were the biggest channels that shoppers looked to for holiday buying. (Similar to what we saw for Black Friday, value-oriented retailers continued to have the best traffic and selling across each region of the United States.)
  

On the all-important teen front, the firm made the following observations:

• Teens received fewer gifts this year, with cash, gift cards, apparel and consumer electronics being the most popular gifts.
• Uggs are still hot -- 30% of our teen panel said they received Uggs boots, slippers or shoes this year.
• Most teens received gift cards this year, but haven’t spent the bulk of them yet. (We believe many are saving them for apparel and other purchasing later in the spring. As a result, we expect to see slow sales trends for most teen retailers until mid-first quarter.)