London Designer Outlet celebrates 10 years with record Q1
Wembley Park’s London Designer Outlet (LDO) has enjoyed its best first quarter on record, as the scheme celebrates 10 years of trading this year.
Sales at the LDO reached £19.7m, a 17% increase year-on-year.
The outlet-led shopping centre also enjoyed its strongest-ever April, with sales of £8.6m representing a year-on-year increase of 16%, and 17% higher than pre-Pandemic levels.
Trading was particularly strong over the two-week Easter holiday, with the scheme recording sales of over £5m during this period for the first time since its opening in 2013.
Average transaction value also increased over Easter, up 14% compared to pre-Pandemic levels.
The results follow a period of five successive record-breaking months at the shopping centre.
LDO has benefitted from a number of brands choosing to upsize and upgrade at the scheme over the last year, with new concepts coming from retailers including Adidas, Nike, Calvin Klein, and Tommy Hilfiger.
The mixed-use nature of Wembley Park has also provided the shopping centre with more customers, with the number of residents within the local catchment increasing from 1,700 in 2013 to over 10,000 in 2023.
Daniel Tomkinson, general manager of LDO, said: “The LDO you see today is a completely different centre than the LDO of 10 years ago. Over the last decade, the outlet proposition has changed immensely – from factory-style outlets where brands were offloading overstocked and end of line goods to state-of-the-art shopping destinations where families visit not only for great deals, but for a day out experience that is much more akin to the experience customers might expect from full-price stores.”
Matt Slade, retail director at site owner Quintain, said LDO’s performance was a “true demonstration of the resilience of the outlet model”.