M&S’ poor clothing and home sales are a well-known tale of woe, with positive quarters a rare cause for celebration.

And since boss Steve Rowe took over the toughest job in retail last year, the picture has remained largely the same as he grapples with legacy strategies, dented consumer appetite for fashion and a troubled socioeconomic outlook.

The first quarter was no exception as like-for-likes fell 1.2% and total sales dipped 0.5%.

Those figures were against shockingly weak comparables – like-for-likes crashed 8.9% at the same point last year.

But Rowe was determinedly upbeat today.

“I’m delighted with where we are,” he said. “We are absolutely on track with what we said.

“I’m quite relaxed… that doesn’t mean we’re complacent, there is still a lot more to do but the fact is this is not anything other than what we’ve planned.”

At M&S’ full-year results, Rowe focused on full-price clothing and home sales, which soared 11%, and this quarter he told the same story.

Full-price sales rose 7% while market share also grew – a good result in a market lacking consumer appetite and awash with discounting and early summer Sales.

Customer reaction

Rowe’s decisions to take a ‘first price, right price’ approach, to trim clothing lines by 10% to remove duplication and unify colour palettes across different ranges has been validated by his customers.

And he was quick to point out that his decision to remove a Sale from the quarter had pulled clothing like-for-likes into minus territory. If the Sale had been retained like-for-likes would have been up 0.8%.

While any rise in full-price sales is to be welcomed, the different ways of looking at the numbers make figuring out the real health of M&S’ overall clothing and home sales more difficult.

Rowe’s approach to full-price and his decision to limit Sales to clearing stock mirrors rival Next, as Nick Bubb identifies in his column for us.

Under former boss Marc Bolland, M&S unsurprisingly chose not to break out full-price sales and so comparing like with like is impossible.

But the picture should be clearer in a few quarters when we will see Rowe’s influence begin to come through.

Ever confident, he asserted today that, once the removal of a major Sale in the next quarter is out of the way and it is possible to compare like with like, he “would expect to see us start to move a little bit more towards a positive number [for total and like-for-like sales]”.

Of course, if he’s able to sustain total sales rises in clothing and home, he’ll be the saviour M&S has been hoping for all these years.

Let’s just hope food does not start becoming a headache.