Dive Brief:
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Warm temps and a dearth of snow as expected has hit many retailers, and more seasonably cold temps and even snow are coming too late for many specialty apparel retailers to recoup their resulting losses of more than $500 million, which doesn't even include similar losses at department stores, according to Planalytics.
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Because of the El Niño-pattern induced warm weather, apparel retailers lost $421 million in sales due to weather between Nov. 1 and Dec. 19, and that rose to more than $500 million through Dec. 26.
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And an expected cool spring, also due to El Niño, will exacerbate weather-related sales problems for apparel retailers, and will likely cause them to make more conservative plans for fall, analysts say.
Dive Insight:
Planning for weather patterns can be difficult, Planalytics notes, because last year’s weather isn’t a good blueprint for what lies ahead.
"Winter is coming," Planalytics president Scott Bernhardt told CNBC. "But it's not going to be enough to make up for missing the holiday season.”
The Eastern seaboard has hosted a warmer winter so far, and sales in the West, where the weather has been more seasonable, has done little to make up for the lost sales.
At least the El Niño weather pattern hasn’t dumped the levels of snow that keep shoppers out of stores, Paul Walsh, VP of weather strategy at The Weather Company, told CNBC. But it will likely mean a cool spring, and yet another retail problem.
"Combined with an early Easter, this means the start to spring buying will likely be delayed in the areas that traditionally sees the earliest start of spring," Walsh said.
In any case, it likely means continued low prices—and therefore losses—on winter gear.
Retailers will “be practically giving it away, but they'll clear it," Bernhardt said. "The level of markdown that you're going to see … we haven't seen that in a very long time."
