Bonmarche gets online boost, fights back in challenging market

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Apr 19, 2017

UK budget womenswear retailer Bonmarché saw rising sales in the 14 weeks to April 1, the final quarter of its fiscal year, it said Wednesday. But while online sales rose 15.2%, physical store comparable sales dipped by 0.5%.

Those figures took into account the fact that the fiscal year had 53 weeks in it. So how did Bonmarché do when the quarter was viewed with that extra week taken out? Well, comparable store sales fell a worse 2.4% and online sales rose a lower 14.8%. That meant the quoted 2.7% total sales rise turned into only a 0.7% increase.

But those figures were still better than the year as a whole with 52-week comparable sales down 4.7%, online sales up only 1.8% and total sales down 0.9%.

Clearly, Bonmarché was getting it more right over the past few months than it did a year ago and for most of the last fiscal year and the improvement seems to have picked dup pace in the last two months.

CEO Helen Connolly said that, as anticipated, trading conditions post-Christmas continued to be challenging with comp sales in stores negative in January. But they were stronger during February and March, and the company saw that resumption of good growth in online sales following improvements made to the online offering.

All that means the company expects pre-tax profit for the fiscal year to April 1 to be slightly above the mid-point of the £5m to £7m range previously quoted last September. We will know the exact figure when the firm delivers its full results on June 19.

So can we expect more good news ahead? Connolly said the firm expects the apparel market to remain tough during the coming financial year, but it is “actively taking measures to improve our proposition to customers” and believes it can “deliver growth in FY18, despite the challenging market."