Melbourne apparel and fashion benchmarks
Melbourne apparel, by the numbers Every figure sourced and dated.
What Victorian households actually spend on clothing, what the average online basket is doing, and how much of the December to February collapse is just the calendar. Assembled from ABS and Australia Post data, cut for Victoria, and sourced line by line.
- Figures on this page
- 8
- Named sources
- 4
- ABS data to
- June 2026
- Sources last checked
- 24 August 2026
Melbourne apparel and textile DTC
Refreshed . Every figure below links the source it came from.
The benchmarks
Where a Melbourne clothing brand actually sits.
Each figure carries the period it covers, where it came from, and one thing to do about it. Where a number is national or global rather than Victorian, its line says so.
$14.5b
The size of the Victorian pool
Spent by Victorian households on clothing and footwear in the 12 months to June 2026. That total grew 4.3% against the 12 months before it.
That is the market you compete in, and it is growing slowly. Flat revenue this year is not holding steady, it is losing share. Set your growth floor at the market rate, not at zero.
+4.3%
Victoria against the country
Victorian clothing and footwear spending over the 12 months to June 2026, against the 12 months before it. Nationally the same category grew 5.1% on exactly the same basis.
Same twelve months on both sides, and Victoria still comes in lower. Benchmark yourself against an Australian or American figure and you will read an ordinary Melbourne year as a bad one. Use the Victorian number.
$11.6b
Online fashion, nationally
Spent online on fashion and apparel across Australia in 2025, up 11.5% on 2024.
Online fashion grew faster than baskets did, so the growth came from more orders rather than bigger ones. If next year depends on lifting average order value, the category is not moving with you.
Source: Australia Post eCommerce Report 2026, data for calendar 2025.
$96
The average basket
The average Australian online basket in 2025, down 0.4% on 2024.
The national basket went backwards. Your average order value sitting flat is the market, not a merchandising failure. Track orders per customer per year instead, because that is where the category is actually moving.
Source: Australia Post eCommerce Report 2026, data for calendar 2025.
16
How many brands your customer buys from
Retailers the average Australian household bought from in 2025. More than double a decade earlier.
A household that spread its spending across a handful of retailers a decade ago now spreads it across sixteen. Repeat rate is under structural pressure before you do anything wrong. Measure your 90-day second-order rate before you spend more on acquisition.
Source: Australia Post eCommerce Report 2026, data for calendar 2025.
24%
Online against the shop floor
Share of all Australian retail spending that happened online in 2025, up 1.6 percentage points on 2024.
Roughly three quarters of retail spending still happens in person. If you have a store, a market stall or stockists, an online-only benchmark understates you. Count both channels or you will misread your own year.
Source: Australia Post eCommerce Report 2026, data for calendar 2025.
73%
What your discount calendar is really doing
Of Australian shoppers wait for a sales event before buying. Among Gen Z it is 96%.
Most of your customers are waiting for a sale and almost all of the youngest ones are. Your promotional calendar is your margin. Track full-price sell-through as its own line, because a strong revenue month can still be a weak month in the bank.
70.22%
Carts that never make it
Of online carts are abandoned before checkout. A global average across 50 studies, not an Australian or apparel figure.
Seven in ten carts are abandoned everywhere, in every category. If yours is near that, the problem is not your funnel, it is the price of selling online. Spend the effort on the three in ten who finish rather than buying more of the seven who do not.
Two of these are Victorian. The rest are national or global, and every line says which. A Victorian figure exists for household spending and does not exist for cart abandonment, and blurring that would be the easiest lie on the page
The one worth printing out
December is not a benchmark for February.
This is the most expensive comparison a Melbourne apparel owner makes, and it is entirely avoidable. Here is the arithmetic.
The same two months, seasonally adjusted
0.9% apart
On the raw numbers, February looks like a catastrophe. Now take the calendar out. On the ABS seasonally adjusted series, those same two months sit about one percent apart. Almost the entire collapse is the season. It is not demand falling away, and it is not you.
Compare February to last February. If you set a January target off a December run rate, you have set a target this market has never once delivered
Source: ABS, Monthly Household Spending Indicator, June 2026 (released 4 August 2026). Calculated by Metric Bridge. Raw figures are the original series, the comparison is the seasonally adjusted series, both current price.
Using them
Three rules that make these worth something.
A benchmark you read once and file is a statistic. These are the three habits that turn the numbers above into a decision.
Compare like periods.
Month against the same month last year, never against last month. Every figure on this page moves with the season, and the seasonal swing is larger than almost any change you will make on purpose.
Treat the market rate as your floor.
The Victorian growth rate is what you have to beat to stay the same size relative to everyone else selling into it. Beating zero is not the same as beating the market, and only one of those keeps your shelf space.
Pick two and track them monthly.
Second-order rate at 90 days and full-price sell-through will tell you more about a Melbourne clothing brand than everything else on this page combined. The rest is context you read once a quarter.
The limits
What this page is not.
The uncomfortable half. Read it before you quote any of these numbers at anyone, including at yourself.
This is household spending, not your revenue.
The ABS measures what Victorian households spend on clothing and footwear, in every shop and on every site, local or overseas. It gives you the size and direction of the pool. It cannot tell you what a brand your size should be turning over, and anyone who says it can is selling something.
These are not our client numbers.
Metric Bridge is new and has no pool of client data behind this page. Everything here is public, which is why every line carries a link. When a consultancy tells you "our clients average X", ask how many clients and over what period. If you cannot check it, it is not a benchmark, it is a claim.
Victoria is not Melbourne.
The ABS publishes household spending by state, not by city. Victoria is the closest honest cut, so we call it Victoria rather than printing Melbourne on a number that covers the whole state.
One month tells you nothing.
Monthly clothing data is extremely noisy, which is why the headline figure here is a rolling twelve months rather than the latest month on its own. Any single month, including a bad one of yours, is usually inside the noise.
One figure is not Australian at all.
Cart abandonment is a global average across fifty studies going back to 2006. No Australian, apparel-specific version is published. It is here because it is still the best available answer to "is my checkout broken", and it is labelled so you can weight it accordingly.
Every one of those is a way a number here could mislead you. We would rather you knew them than quoted us badly
Sources, and how the Victorian numbers were worked out
ABS, Monthly Household Spending Indicator
June 2026. Checked 24 August 2026.
Tables 2 and 4, Clothing and footwear, current price. Rolling 12-month totals and the seasonal comparison are our arithmetic on the published series. Retail Trade, Australia ceased on 31 July 2025; MHSI replaced it.
Australia Post eCommerce Report 2026
Calendar year 2025. Checked 25 July 2026.
11th annual edition, previously titled Inside Australian Online Shopping. Spend and transaction figures in it are CommBank iQ banking data.
Australia Post Omnibus Survey, July 2025
July 2025. Checked 25 July 2026.
Reference 4 within the eCommerce Report 2026. Consumer sample of at least 1,500, weighted to be nationally representative.
50 studies published 2006 to 2025. Checked 25 July 2026.
An average of 50 published studies rather than one sample. Global, not Australian, and Baymard publishes no apparel split on this page.
The Victorian figures are our own arithmetic on the published ABS series, not a number the ABS prints. We total the last twelve months rather than quote a single month, and we read the seasonally adjusted series next to the raw one to separate the calendar from real movement. The ABS tables are free and linked above, so the workings can be checked in about ten minutes.
Refresh cadence
The ABS series updates monthly and the rest update annually. This page is refreshed at least quarterly. If the date at the top is more than a quarter old, treat every number on it with suspicion, which is the same thing we would tell you about your own reporting.
These numbers are the marketYours are the ones that pay you.
This page tells you what Melbourne is doing. One month of your own data next to it tells you what to do about it. Fifteen minutes, no deck, and we will put three of your numbers against these live.
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