Manchester firm, N Brown has seen its revenues fall by over 5% as it moves forwards with its digital transformation.
It said that 84% of its £432.9m income now comes from ecommerce.
Profit before tax was up by 3.9%, reaching £31.8m, there were also increases for digital sales across its womenswear and menswear.
By brand, 97.6% of Simply Be’s income is now through online. It’s 97.2% for Jacamo and 79.6% for JD Williams.
“We announced our new strategy in May to return N Brown to sustainable profit growth and we have made good progress over the first half of the year,” said Steve Johnson, Chief Executive.
“In particular, we have delivered on our strategy of growing digital revenue across Simply Be, JD Williams, Jacamo and Ambrose Wilson. This has been achieved by taking a more targeted approach to marketing and customer recruitment. The retail environment remains heavily promotional, but we are concentrating on continuing to improve our customer proposition and ensuring we operate as efficiently as possible, which has led to an increase of 4% in adjusted EBITDA for the period. We remain focussed on implementing our plans and the Board’s full year expectations are unchanged.”
N Brown said that in the last 6 months it had also relaunched its social media strategy, including “entirely new content” for Jacamo on Instagram – which it said had generated “good early results.”
In the short term, the firm said that it planned to “enhance use of rich data” to improve customer insight. This has seen it move to a customer lifetime value (“CLTV”) investment model in its digital marketing strategy to drive a more sustainable financial outcome.
