A look at the apparel and jewelry power players on the NRF's 2024 Top 100 Retailers list

Back to basics: The market returns to normalcy
Sandy Smith
NRF Contributor

The National Retail Federation’s annual Top 100 Retailers list ranks retailers based on U.S. sales. Walmart continues to hold the top spot, followed by Amazon, Costco, Kroger and The Home Depot. This series takes a look at power players in select retail categories. Power players are retailers in this Top 100 list with 2023 U.S. sales equal to or greater than 10% of the sales of the category leader.

2024 Top 100 Retailers List

NRF's Top 100 Retailers ranks the industry’s largest companies according to sales.

View the complete chart.

The apparel and jewelry category is almost Dickensian in its best of times, worst of times storyline. But dig a bit deeper beyond the headlines and this might just be the biggest throughline of a return to normalcy.

Take Signet Jewelers, which jumped up 10 spots last year after an acquisition of Blue Nile and Diamonds Direct before dropping back down 11 places to No. 67 this year. David Marcotte, senior vice president of global retail and technology for Kantar, says not to worry. Kantar compiles data for the National Retail Federation’s annual ranking of the industry’s 100 largest retailers by domestic retail sales and identifies the Power Players.

 

 

“Signet had a great year last year, and how often do people make major purchases in jewelry? When people could not buy other products, jewelry was extremely easy to purchase,” Marcotte says. “If I have to move inventory in grocery or just about any other category, I need a boat. In jewelry, I could move an entire store in a suitcase. Jewelry did not have the supply chain issues that other retailers did and has done very well. This is just settling down.”

Other areas in this category also are just settling down, Marcotte believes, and work-from-home casual attire is playing a role.

Discounters, particularly TJX Companies, are the outliers here. TJX is holding strong after several years of solid growth. In 2022 retail sales were at $30.21 billion (not including HomeGoods), up 3.6%. That comes after a 51% increase in 2021, with the company benefitting from all the retailers that discounted and closed out everything in the midst of the pandemic. This year, TJX turned in another solid performance, seeing same-store growth of 6%. Fellow discounters Ross Stores and Burlington also saw solid same-store growth.

Learn more about the retailers on NRF’s annual Top 100 Retailers list.

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