By James Davey

LONDON (Reuters) – The outlook for the UK consumer remained positive, the boss of clothing retailer Next said on Thursday, noting there was nothing in its current numbers that suggested a fundamental malaise.

In March, Simon Wolfson, Britain’s longest-serving FTSE 100 CEO, said the UK consumer outlook was the best it had been than since before the pandemic in 2020.

However, a difficult half for the UK clothing industry followed, with an unseasonably cold spring and a cool and wet early summer weighing on sales.

Demand since July has picked up, with Next reporting sales in the first six weeks of its fiscal second half that “materially exceeded” its expectations.

“I don’t think things were as bad as they appeared to be in the summer,” Wolfson told Reuters in an interview.

“Our view is that sales are going to become more and more volatile as customers leave more and more of their purchasing decisions until the point at which they actually need goods,” he said after Next reported half year results.

Wolfson said ‘big ticket’ discretionary home furnishing items remained a difficult market. “But we think that is more to do with the stagnant housing market than it is to do with the price of the goods.”

The CEO also highlighted the state of Next’s finance business as a good indicator of the health of the UK consumer.

“People are paying down their balances a little bit faster than they were this time last year, which is a positive sign for the consumer and default rates are the lowest level they’ve ever been for us,” he said.

“There is nothing we can see in our numbers that suggest any sort of fundamental malaise.”

Wolfson said one potential cloud on the horizon that could hold back the consumer economy was a weaker job market, though he was encouraged that it hadn’t shrunk yet.

(Reporting by James Davey, Editing by Paul Sandle)