How has George Helped Parents Get Their Kids Back to School This Term?

LONDON, September 2, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

Children up and down the country will soon be making their way back to school, so George at Asda are taking a look back at how they've helped make parents' lives easier over the last few weeks.

Firstly, George's range of school uniform was given a gold star of approval by the Good Housekeeping Institute, which meticulously tested a range of George's schoolwear items and declared them "great value and hard wearing", providing both quality and value in the run up to the new term.

Of the commendation, Paul Wright, Head of Quality at George, stated: "As well as the rigorous tests the Good Housekeeping Institute puts the range through, we independently test our school uniform for colourfastness, stability and appearance to make sure our shoppers get the best value for money."

George also teamed up with the Sun newspaper to offer readers a £40 George voucher to further assist parents with crucial schoolwear purchases during the back to school period.

The clothing brand also conducted listening sessions in which the nation's Mums and Dads could suggest changes to the range in order to improve quality and value. One of the commonalities discovered during this research was that durability was more important to parents then value alone - as a result, George now provides a 100-Day Guarantee as well as making a number of practical changes to the design of several schoolwear items in their range.

In the run up to 'Schoolwear Sunday', George released some compelling survey data that revealed a number of insights about consumer buying habits during the run up to the new term. These included:

• School uniform sales expected to up 35% at George at Asda this weekend
• Two items of school wear will be sold every second
• George at Asda's 'Click and Collect' service already up 25% on this time last year
• School uniform market is worth over £959 million*

The Click and Collect Service was a big success for the supermarket giant, which saw an increase of 25% over the previous year.

Sarah Payne, school wear buyer for George at Asda, said: "We have seen a huge surge in our buy online and collect in store service this week as it offers a quick and simple way for parents to buy their children's uniforms. Some customers have told us they're going to take advantage of the bank holiday weekend for their back to school shopping so we're prepared for customer demand, and traditionally we see an increase in sales at this time of year."

As a result of George's listening sessions, improved quality and consistently great value when it comes to school uniform, parents can rest assured that their kids are in safe hands throughout the back to school period and beyond.

* Pulse of the Nation survey carried out 19th - 22nd August 2011

About Asda Stores Ltd.

Founded in the 1960s, Asda today is one of Britain's leading retailers.  It has over 170,000 dedicated Asda colleagues serving customers from 424 stores, including 25 ASDA Living stores, 23 depots and eight recycling centres across the UK (Great Britain and Northern Ireland).  It has its main home office in Leeds, Yorkshire and its George clothing division based in Lutterworth Leicestershire.   Asda serves over 18 million shoppers a week in store and its growing home shopping business serves over 97 per cent of UK homes.

About Chosen By You

Chosen By You is an unprecedented re-launch of Asda's entire mid-tier own brand range, consisting of over 6,923 products. The launch follows an intense period of quality benchmarking and independent customer taste testing, which means Asda customers are given the very best in terms of quality and value. Every single one of the products has been tested by real customers up and down the country at 836 locations - and only those that get a big thumbs up make it into the range. Chosen By You has rolled out into Free From products and 4,250 tests have been conducted with the help from Coeliac sufferers. Asda have already conducted more than 370,000 blind taste tests involving 63,714 customers, making this the biggest piece of product testing ever done by a supermarket.

About Asda's Price Guarantee

With Asda's Price Guarantee customers can be safe in the knowledge that the price they pay at Asda is cheaper than at Tesco, Sainsbury's, Morrisons and Waitrose, otherwise we will refund the difference.

ASDA PR Team
Telephone: +44(0)20-3003-6555
email: asda@freud.com