Shop Direct, the owner of Littlewoods, had a record Christmas as mobile sales boomed at its main Very operation.
Group sales increased 6% in the seven weeks to 25 December, beating the wider market for non-food retailers, where sales barely grew.
Growth was fuelled by a 17% rise in sales at Very, where transactions on phones and tablets rose by almost a third to make up 63% of all sales. The company did not give figures for Littlewoods, whose sales have declined in recent years, but it said the business performed better than expected.
Shop Direct’s top-selling gift was perfume with 284,000 items sold. Sales of mobile phones increased by 74% and clothing and footwear sales rose 6%, bucking the trend for weak sales at Next and other fashion retailers after the warmest December on record.
Shop Direct is owned by the billionaire Barclay brothers, whose other businesses include the Telegraph news organisation and the London Ritz hotel. They bought Littlewoods in 2002 and scrapped the Littlewoods catalogue last year to make Shop Direct a wholly digital retailer with two virtual department stores online.
Very is aimed at younger, more fashion conscious shoppers than those of Littlewoods, whose mail order business started in 1937. Shop Direct launched an upmarket sister operation, Veryexclusive, last year concentrating on women’s fashion and accessories.
Alex Baldock, Shop Direct’s chief executive, attributed the group’s success to being online only without the distraction of stores or catalogues. He said that allowed Shop Direct to concentrate on fast-growing mobile sales on digital devices.
Baldock said: “Christmas 2015 was a record-breaker for Shop Direct. Received wisdom is that every retailer should be multi-channel. We don’t buy that. We like being a Digital pure-play. It allows us to keep things simple and focus our energy on mobile innovation, which has been a big factor in our record peak trading.”
Shop Direct has its own finance operation that offers shoppers various ways to buy goods on credit. It is spending £50m to come up with more personalised options for customers buying items on credit.
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