Black Friday sales grow 95% for The Hut Group
ONLINE health and beauty retailer The Hut Group has announced record breaking sales on Black Friday, with 95% growth.
The Northwich-headquartered company said international sales grew rapidly, with 66% of Black Friday customers coming from outside the UK, compared with 48% last year. The group also saw a 56% increase in new customers on last year.
The Hut Group saw more than 3 million unique visitors to its 120 websites in 24 hours, selling over 3,000 items per minute in peak hours.
Across its beauty websites such as lookfantastic, the Group sold 19,000 kilos of shampoo and conditioner on Black Friday alone, which is enough to power 1.9 million showers.
Top selling brands and products across the Group included: Foreo Luna, Playstation 4 Slim, subscription boxes LFBeautyBox and ZBOX, Caudalie, NARS, Illamasqua, Glamglow, T3, Myprotein’s Impact Whey and ghd IV Styler.
The Hut Group celebrated the start of the event with a selection of its key brand ambassadors – including Louise Thompson from Made in Chelsea, model Chloe Lloyd, fitness athletes The West Twins, Kirk Miller and Abby Pell – who helped to pack up the first Black Friday orders in the newly built Omega Warehouse in Warrington on Friday.
The owner of online retail sites and brands such as Myprotein, Lookfantastic, Skinstore and IdealShape said it had to invest heavily in its technology and logistics platform through 2016 to accommodate the immense growth.
Over the year it opened a £120m, 1 million sq ft manufacturing and distribution centre in Cheshire; launched its 250,000 sq ft distribution centre in Kentucky, USA; launched 60 localised language websites to capitalize on international demand; and created 1,000 jobs in Cheshire, including 400 new graduate roles, taking the group’s headcount to 3,000.
The Black Friday success was also assisted by the group’s recent investment in the US market with acquisitions Skinstore, IdealShape and IdealFit, which saw US sales soar over 250% year-on-year as well as continued growth in Europe and Asia of above 120% and 160% respectively.
Matthew Moulding, chief executive and founder, said: “This performance was underpinned by both the operational execution of our people and the quality of our operating platform in delivering a first class customer experience across the globe.
“We’ve invested £230m this year to deliver a step change across our infrastructure, launching two brand new purpose built manufacturing and distribution centres and significant expansion of our HQ campus in Cheshire, as we created over 1,000 new jobs in the year.
“We are well placed for 2017 and plan to make similar substantial infrastructure investments over the next 12 months, which should support future growth and significant new job creation.”
