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How do you achieve private label success? We’ve taken a look at the most successful private label retailers in the UK, and here’s our final list.
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Store brand, house brand, own brand, or private label. No matter what you call it, private label retailers are turning own brands into good business, making up 39% of the market share in value sales, and a 46% share of in unit sales across the EU according to the report Private labels: Transformation for Growth.
But all private label brands weren’t created equal, and as with any brand, some are more successful than others.
We've taken a look at some of the most, if not all, of the private label brands in the UK to figure out which are the most successful private label retailers. And in this article, we'll share our findings.
Before we get to judging which UK private label retailers are the most successful, we need to define what a private label is, and how we measure private label success.
Starting with the definition of private label we will lean on the definition from Private Label Strategy: How to Meet the Store Brand Challenge by Kumar and Steenkamp, in their work they state that a private label is “any brand that is owned by the retailer or the distributor and is sold only in its own outlets.”
When it comes to for defining private label success, it becomes a bit more complex. We’ve looked at four different factors ranging from size of private label offering and share of private label sales to overall brand recognition. You can find a more detailed description of the judging criteria at the end of this article.
The online retailer ASOS is one of the global fast-fashion leaders, and that is in no small part to their own-brand offering. Primarily aimed at fashion products for young adults, their own-brand lines are presented alongside products from high profile brands like Niké, adidas, and Levi’s.
The ASOS own-brand lines aren’t just another brand in their catalogue, and many of them are positioned with social issues in mind, like ASOS Curve which is their plus size range and ASOS Made In Kenya, which is produced in collaboration with SOKO Kenya—a sustainable clothing factory in Kenya.
The latter is especially noticeable as ASOS Made In Kenya in is one of the few own brand labels to land a highlight spot in Vogue Magazine, and have even been worn by former first lady Michelle Obama.
With 2200 shops across the UK and Ireland, Boots isn’t just a beauty and health retailer, they’re the biggest pharmacy chain in the country, but that’s not why they’re on this list of the most successful private label brands in the UK.
While the Boots own brand line of course includes Boots Everyday, 17 and Soltan, it also includes No7 Beauty Company’s portfolio of brands such as Botanics, YourGoodSkin, Sleek MakeUP and Soap & Glory.
There is an argument to be made that some of these brands transcend the definition of private label or own brand, it is noticeable just how far and wide the brands have spread, to a point where many of them are no longer exclusively available at the Boots stores.
When it comes to value share of private label brands or share of shelf space within the stores, there’s simply no competing with Aldi. From Specially Selected to Appleton Farms and Bee Happy, Aldi has a private label brand for any purpose.
There’s a good chance you could purchase anything you would ever need, from food, to toys, to camping gear and automotive accessories, using only Aldi private label brands.
So it might not come as a shock that Aldi is on this list.
If we measure private label success exclusively based on the size of the private label offering Aldi would claim the top spot—not just in the UK. Roughly 90% of the products on ALDI’s shelves are private label products.
And the same would be true if we measured private label success exclusively based on the value share of private label products, as figures from last year shows that 80% of Aldi’s overall sales in 2024 were private label products.
With a 70% share of private label products on the shelves Tesco is right up there with Aldi when it comes to the size of their private label offering.
The Tesco private label brands offer everything from fresh foods and vegetables to meat, pastries, ready meals, baked goods, kitchen cupboard essentials and even clothes.
And that last one, is another reason why they need to be included on any list of the most successful private label retailers in the UK—and probably in the world.
In 2012 Tesco’s low cost brand, Tesco Value, moved away from their modest, utilitarian branding, because they’d found that shoppers were embarrassed to put the cheap looking brand items in their bags.
Fast forward to July 2023, and the Tesco Value brand was all over the London Fashion Week. Yes, that’s right.
Designer JW Anderson sent a model down the catwalk in a dress seemingly made from two Tesco carrier bags that had been sewn together, and menswear designer Christopher Shannon sent out models in red, white and blue striped hats and jumpers.
But this turn of designers suddenly sending out fashion lines inspired by Tesco didn’t happen out of the blue. The man to blame was actually Demna Gvasalia—creative director of luxury brand Balenciaga.
In March 2022 Balenciaga revealed their new Monday Shopper Bag. A £925 white calfskin bag, adorned with an obviously Tesco inspired Balenciaga logo.
By sheer pedigree and dedication to putting private labels on the shelves, it’s hard to find a brand that is more suited to be in the running for the top private label retailer than Marks & Spencer.
Their first own brand was introduced in 1928 under the name St. Michael, after co-founder Michael Marks. And by 1950 as good as every product sold at Marks & Spencer was sold under the St. Michael brand, with some products, like women’s clothing and girls'uniforms, sold under other brands.
But even so, every product sold at Marks & Spencer were private label products.
It wasn’t until 2006 that Marks & Spencer broke their track record of only selling own brand products, when they started putting big brands like Coca Cola and Stella Artois on their shelves to fill gaps in their product line-ups.
Just like food retailers Aldi and Tesco, Lidl has a huge share of private label products on the shelves across their 700 UK stores, with 85% of their products being their own brands.
But that’s not necessarily the only reason we should look towards Lidl when it comes to their approach to private labels.
The originally German supermarket retailer has started focusing on supply chain transparency when it comes to their private label products, publishing lists of the more than 600 text and footwear manufacturers involved in producing their own brand products, in addition to making information about manufacturers and suppliers of everything from food, drinks, snacks and confectionery to tobacco, cosmetics, and cleaning products publicly available.
With an own brand share of close to 70%, Sainsbury’s is yet another example of a very successful private label retailer, with brands such as Sainsbury's, Argos, Nectar, Habitat, Tu, and Taste the difference. But their own brand product line doesn’t stop with ordinary retail goods.
In January 2024, Sainsbury’s launched the Smart Charge brand, which lets shoppers (and everyone else) charge their electric vehicles at the Smart Charge stations. (source) This is both good business, but more importantly it helps Sainsbury’s brand themselves with values important to the consumers they reach.
And retailing electricity isn’t the only alternative private label brand in the Sainsbury’s portfolio. While not a retail product at all, Sainsbury’s Bank is another brand in their portfolio, which has been in business since 1997. Starting out as a joint venture between Sainsbury’s and Bank of Scotland, the private label retailer took complete ownership of the bank in 2014 after acquiring the remaining 50% of the shares from Lloyds Banking Group. In 2017 Sainsbury’s Bank had 2.1 million active customers.
While Waitrose is a dedicated private label retailer with its own brand products covering 600 items from spices and fresh produce to regional specialties like bao and premium ready meals, the most noticeable thing about the brand is their ownership.
Waitrose is owned by The John Lewis Partnership, which is the UK’s largest employee owned business, which means that the 300 Waitrose stores, along with some 30 John Lewis stores, are owned in Trust by approximately 70,000 partners.
Their dedication to offering value brands to their customers is evident with launches of several organic products, including free-range cream SKU’s in their private label range.
And their commitment to private label products have not faltered, as Waitrose recently refreshed its premium own brand range, Duchy Organic, just this spring, filing new branding, logos and color scheme with the Intellectual Property Office.
When we start talking about successful private label retailers, and attempt to find the most successful, we have to define what private label success means, and there are a couple of different ways to do that.
For the context of this article, we’ve judged the private label retailers based on the following four criteria:
These definitions were chosen keeping in mind that while private label products are of course meant to be sold, it’s necessarily the only purpose, as many private label retailers use own brand product lines to drive purchases of national products as well.
While size of the private label offering was an important aspect of this list, judging by size alone wouldn’t give the full picture.
For one, supermarkets and FMCG retailers like Aldi, Lidl, and Tesco would be at the very top of the list, owing to the size of their offering, but they would all be beaten by a retailer like IKEA who, if deemed a private label retailer as they would be according to the Kumar-Steenberg definition of own brands, has a private label offering which makes up 100% of their product line.
Secondly, we can judge private label success based on the share of sales that are private label products vs national or global label products.
With this approach we would actually see Aldi come out ahead again, with 80% of their sales coming from private label products.
Again, though, we run into the problem that many retailers with successful own brand lines, but big national brand offerings would be left in the dust, not because of their lack of dedication or innovation within the private label space, but because their overall selection of own brand is more focused.
While notoriety of own brand product lines makes sense to a certain degree, it does become muddy, because a well-known brand isn’t always the same as a successful brand.
For instance, if we judged by brand exposure alone, Tesco could end up as the single most successful private label fashion retailer, even though they aren’t a fashion retailer in the first place, simply because their Tesco Value brand inspired a lot of bigger fashion brands during the 2022-2023 fashion weeks.
While judging the success of private label retailers by the number of stores or their annual revenue is an easy way to compare, it would mean that more successful retailers, less focused on their own brand product lines, could come out as being ‘the most successful private label retailer’ which wouldn’t necessarily make sense.
Completely ignoring the aspect of retailer size, would pose a similar issue, where less successful retailers could end up beating out more successful private label retailers, simply because they had the biggest dedication to their private label strategy, successful or not.
