Following today’s release of Hugo Boss’s figures for the three months ending 30 June 2025; Chloe Tedford-Jones, apparel analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers her view: “Hugo Boss reported a 1.3% decline in reported sales for Q2 FY2025, maintaining a similar trend to the previous quarter, with revenues falling to €1.0bn. Excluding currency effects, sales grew 1%, highlighting the impact of adverse exchange rates, however, the brand remains impacted by weak consumer sentiment, especially given its premium positioning, with many shoppers being forced to trade down. H1 totally declined 1.4%, with the group reaffirming its full-year guidance, expecting growth ranging from -2% and +2%, indicating that it is hopeful there could be a slight improvement in H2. Hugo Boss continued to make operational progress, focusing on optimisation and cost discipline, allowing its EBIT to rise 15.7% to €81m in Q2 FY2025. Looking ahead, Hugo Boss anticipates further profitability improvements in H2, with its full-year EBIT expected to reach between €380m and €440m, corresponding to an EBIT margin of 9-10%.
“EMEA and the Americas returned to growth in Q2, increasing in currency-adjusted terms by 3% and 2%, respectively. EMEA was largely driven by an increase in sales in Germany and France, while the UK remained challenging. The Americas was aided by strong growth in Latin America as well as an improvement in the US, likely as shoppers pulled forward purchases ahead of the tariff-related price rises expected in H2. Asia Pacific saw a decline of 5%, echoing previous results, dragged down by the Chinese market, where the group’s brands suffer from their premium positioning as government advice discourages wealth flaunting. For the rest of the year, Hugo Boss expects sales in EMEA and the Americas to remain around prior-year levels in reported currency, but this may be ambitious for the latter considering that reported sales were down 4.3% in H1, and tariff impacts are due to hit soon. In Asia Pacific, the group expects a moderate decline in reported sales for the full year, following a 7.5% decline in H1.
“Brick-and-mortar retail sales declined by 3.7%, while wholesale brick-and-mortar grew by a modest 0.4%, highlighting the group’s difficulty in in attracting consumers to its own stores. Increased investment in experiential retail features could help reverse this trend by driving footfall and reinforcing its brand identity. The group’s digital sales grew 5.3%, However, Hugo Boss’ online penetration was still only 19.9%, so the group would benefit from continued investment into enhancing its online offering as the channel remains a rare bright spot in an otherwise sluggish apparel market.
“BOSS menswear registered the best performance with sales growth of 1.8%, following a 1.4% decline in Q1, thanks to the successful continuation of collaborations with David Beckham and Porsche. BOSS womenswear and HUGO’s sales fell by 8.8% and 13.2%, respectively, which is a stark contrast to their outperformance in FY2024. Even in Q1 FY2025, Boss womenswear was still stronger than BOSS menswear, with flat sales. However, these declines seem to be partly driven by strategic business moves, such as streamlining the product assortment, which may have limited the choice for shoppers. For now, this decline seems to be somewhat intentional and managed but will need to be monitored closely to ensure this translates to future growth.”
