Staycation boom to drive sales through autumn, says Halfords boss

Chief executive Graham Stapleton is confident that growing sales related to the staycation trend will continue into the autumn. This comes following strong full-year performance over the pandemic.

He said: “We’ve seen a lot of growth. We think that will continue and there’s no reason to see that drop. We think that will go all the way through the summer, into the autumn, all the way through our peak season.”

Stapleton said that the retailer has maintained a good level of stock, having bought “aggressively” in preparation for continued demand for motoring, cycling and caravan products.

Halfords will also increase its service-led business towards the end of the year.

Stapleton describes the upcoming transformation as a “massive” part of the brand’s strategy as the services area of the business looks set to be larger than the brand’s retail footprint for the first time. 

“By the end of this year, there is a high chance that we will have more garages/Autocentres than stores for the first time in Halfords’ history. We may have more mobile vans doing servicing than we have stores.”

“Therefore, if you add up all of the servicing stuff that we do, be it a van or a garage, we are likely to have twice as many of them as we have retail stores.”

“Historically, that’s an enormous change because, until last year, we’ve always had more stores than anything else.”

A further focus will be on electric scooters and bicycles, which saw sales accelerate by 94% last year.

Increased servicing of electrics to meet this newfound demand will be completed by a planned 2,000 electric technicians by the end of the year – a jump from the current 800 technicians.

Although supply challenges were mentioned as a potential challenge in the full-year results, Stapleton said that, at present, this is not a cause for concern. “In terms of current supply issues, the good news is we’ve got very limited, if any, supply issues in motoring,” he said.

“In cycling, we have very good availability of electric bikes, scooters and kids’ bikes. We have some supply challenges in adult mechanical bikes at the moment. They are the same challenges that every cycling retailer globally is seeing because there just isn’t enough manufacturing supply to deliver the global demand.”

Stapleton added that, as the biggest retailer in this space in the UK, Halfords has leveraged relationships with supply partners in Asia to prepare for shortages.

“We won’t be in full availability, but we will be in better availability than lots of other businesses because of the relationships we’ve got with our brand supply partners.”

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