Sosandar surged again last year, growth continues in Q1 as it broadens offer

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jul 3, 2019

Womenswear e-tailer Sosandar released its full-year results on Wednesday and turned in yet another giant leap in sales for the year to the end of March. Admittedly, the still-young company’s sales remain tiny compared to many of its peers and so such leaps are to be expected. But its progress certainly shows how appealing its offer is as it targets the 35+ age group with an on-trend offer, even in a fashion retail market that's facing its biggest challenges for many decades.

The company said that its revenue rose 228% to £4.44 million in the latest year and its gross margin saw a huge improvement to reach 55.5%, up from 49.4% a year ago. That helped drive gross profit up 28% to £2.44 million. The company remains loss-making as it’s still at an early stage, but the loss on an EBITDA basis fell to £3.49 million from £6 million.

And importantly, the growth seems to have continued. The first quarter of the new year has “started strongly and in line with our expectations, with June setting a new record for the number of units sold in a month.”

Repeat orders for Q1 rose 122% year-on-year and it saw 23% revenue growth. This has been achieved through “strong repeat business with deliberately less emphasis on new customer acquisition as external factors resulted in a tougher acquisition environment.”

The company said that “being an agile e-commerce business, we have been able to respond quickly to external forces, making the prudent strategic decision to hold back funds to invest for customer acquisition in future months where we expect to achieve a better return on marketing spend.”

Looking back at last year, the company said that its order growth had risen 224% to almost 103,000 orders and its conversion rate increased by 76bps to 2.92%, while the customer database rose 95% and active customer numbers increase by 185% to more than 62,000. And it also increased its following on Facebook and Instagram by 72% and 208% respectively.

During the year, the company had more than doubled the number of new styles and broadened its size range, two moves that clearly paid off in terms of engagement, sales and profits.

Co-CEOs Ali Hall and Julie Lavington said on Wednesday that the company is “continuing to invest in the expansion of our product range, most recently making investment into specialist areas of footwear, accessories, knitwear and denim. Our social channels continue to expand rapidly, and we have seen an ever-growing army of high-profile celebrities wearing our clothes such as Amanda Holden, Kelly Brook and Natalie Pinkham. We have also been featured regularly in the national press.”

They added that “recent investment into specialist design areas and new factories will drive a larger product range going forward, further enhancing choice for existing customers to continue increasing their frequency of purchase and broadening the appeal even further for new customer acquisition.”