Feelunique has grown its sales by more than a quarter in a year that saw shoppers turn online to buy at home beauty treatments during lockdown.
The beauty ecommerce platform, ranked a Top250 retailer in RXUK Top500 research, today reports total sales of £103.5m in a trading statement for the year to March 29. That’s 26% up on the previous year.
Within that, the fastest growth was in marketplace sales, which rose by 695% on last time. Marketplace sales now account for 2% of its business, with more than 800 brands selling 12,000 products. Its larger retail sales business grew by 24.4%. Active customer numbers grew by 42% at the same time to 1.3m, taking its total customer database to 6m.
The fast sales growth helped Feelunique to move into profit, reporting earnings before interest, tax and one-off costs (EBITDA) of £2.5m – up by £7.5m from an EBITDA loss of £5m the previous year and its best result to date.
Feelunique says that expanding the choice of brands and products helped it to grow as shoppers moved away from frequent make-up purchases in lockdown but rather opted to look after their skin and carry out professional-standard treatments at home.
Sarah Miles, chief executive of Feelunique, says: “We are really pleased to have achieved a record performance during the 2021 financial year underpinned by strong growth in our retail channel and outstanding progress in our rapidly expanding Marketplace proposition.
“This performance reflects our core strengths, namely our customer proposition, proprietary technology, and people.”
Miles says the strong growth comes after a focus on improving the customer proposition “by both expanding our brand relationships and driving continued improvements to the user experience”. The retailer launched a Feelunique Rewards loyalty programme during the year, as well as developing a new beauty kit proposition and improving its multimedia content.
She adds: “These initiatives were supported by ongoing investments in our proprietary platform to strengthen the foundations for Feelunique’s long-term and sustainable growth. We are well positioned to further capitalise on the structural growth in ecommerce penetration in the beauty market and accomplish our long-term growth objectives both in the UK and internationally.”
