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The Manchester-based company announced on Thursday it has launched its first Term Loan B (TLB) debt, raising £510m with a seven-year maturity. Additionally, it received a five-year £150m revolving credit facility, which is fully underwritten by Barclays, HSBC, Citi and Santander.
The group, which is behind several beauty brands, a leading cosmetics e-tail site and proprietary e-commerce platform, described the deals as a “major step forward”.
The Hut Group has grown sales from £80m in 2010 to £916m in 2018 and “well in excess” of £1 billion this year. Two-thirds of revenues are generated outside the UK, particularly in Europe, Asia and the US. Driving this staggering growth is the firm’s unique business model, underpinned by its vertically integrated, technology-first consumer brand portfolio and a range of technology services.
The new funds will be used to further improve the different parts of the model. On the one hand is the portfolio of own brands, which currently generates more than 50% of sales. These include Myprotein and seven prestige beauty brands: Espa, Christophe Robin, Ameliorate, Grow Gorgeous, Mio Skincare, Illamasqua and Eyeko.
On the other hand is Ingenuity, an e-commerce and operating platform that rivals Salesforce, Magento and Shopify. Ingenuity is an ambitious service offering an end-to-end ecommerce solution across hosting, content creation, translation, more than 50 payment options, over 100 courier options, affiliate marketing networks, brand events, and manufacturing and distribution centres.
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Kylie Jenner has agreed to sell a 51% stake in her lucrative beauty business to Coty for $600 million as part of a long-term strategic partnership to further develop the firm into a global powerhouse brand.
Under the terms of the deal, Kylie Jenner will continue to lead all creative efforts in terms of product and communications initiatives and work together with Coty to set and lead the strategic direction of her brands, focusing on global expansion and entry into new beauty categories.
Meanwhile, Coty will leverage its capabilities in R&D, manufacturing, distribution, commercial and go-to-market expertise to drive growth at the beauty business. It will also act as a licensee for skincare, fragrances, and nail products.
Jenner, who is widely regarded as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, said the partnership will allow her beauty brands to reach even more fans around the world.
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Shop Direct has announced a partnership with the University of Liverpool to develop tech and data talent.
The British fashion group said it will develop a joint programme of activity for students across STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) other business-related subjects such as marketing and finance.
With three e-commerce sites and annual sales of £2 billion, Shop Direct is the UK’s largest pureplay digital retailer.
Leading initiatives have included the creation of a customer closeness team, which deals directly with customer queries to identify improvement opportunities. In the year ended 30 June, this innovation helped increase first contact resolution rate to 70% from 49%.
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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Inc on Monday said sales for its annual Singles’ Day shopping blitz hit 158.31 billion yuan ($22.63 billion) in its first nine hours, up 25% from 126.72 billion yuan at the same point last year.
Alibaba netted sales worth $30 billion on its platforms on Singles’ Day last year, dwarfing the $7.9 billion U.S. online sales for Cyber Monday. Yet the 27% sales growth was the lowest in the event’s 10-year history, spurring a search for fresh ideas.
Sales hit $1 billion in the first minute and eight seconds and reached 84 billion yuan in the first hour, up 22% from last year’s early haul of 69 billion yuan.
Singles’ Day was among the top trending topics on China’s Twitter-like Weibo microblogging platform on Monday morning, with users discussing what they spent their money on.
Alibaba has said it expects over 500 million users to participate in the shopping festival this year, about 100 million more than last year.
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International gift shoppers are set to buy from the UK as they do their Christmas shopping this year while British consumers will be heading to M&S, Boots, Nike and Adidas.
Those are some of the conclusions of a new survey of 5,000 people across EMEA and APAC by Rakuten Marketing, which said that UK brands seem to be very popular among shoppers abroad. In fact, as many as 45% of international respondents said they’d make a purchase from the UK this Christmas season.
Rakuten said that two-thirds of shoppers generally plan to consider buying gifts from overseas this time. And UK brands topped the popularity list for those who plan to shop across borders, especially those from Germany (60%), Singapore (49%) and Australia (44%).
Discounts are key for a large number of shoppers, but the attitude to money-off deals seems to vary widely around the world. For instance, Rakuten said that 41% of Britons say they’re not led by discounts or sales when holiday shopping, while an even bigger 43% of Germans agree and 31% of those in France. But in China, an almost-universal 98% said they’re led by discounts and sales. The numbers in Singapore (92%) are almost as high.
The researchers also said that under-pressure UK retailers looking to maximise their opportunities this season need to specifically target foreign foreign shoppers.
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There’s talk this week that the CEO of Boots owner Walgreen Boots Alliance could be planning to take the company private in what could potentially be the biggest leveraged buyout in history.
In the UK, Boots retains its status as the top health and beauty retailer and also has a very strong online operation. But its market share is being eroded by a hugely competitive environment and the company is cutting back its bloated store estate with plans to shut a large number of shops.
The giant operation has a market value of around £49bn and private equity firm KKR is being suggested as a potential buyer.
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Advertisers have almost doubled the amount they’re spending on Instagram influencer campaigns in the US and Canada since 2018. However in the past three months alone, $65m has been wasted reaching fake followers – with household names like P&G and Disneyland among the top spenders duped.
According to figures from influencer measurement company Instascreener, North American advertisers allocated a $478m slice of their budgets to influencers in Q3.
Instagram took the lion’s share of this, pooling in $340m worth of spend (an increase of 95% on the same period last year). Although, of this $65m was funnelled into reaching fake eyeballs.
P&G’s Febreze was crowned the “most fooled” brand when it came to investing in campaigns that reached bots instead of people. Analysis on its sponsored Instagram posts indicated that of the accounts that had engaged with the post 54% were fake.
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Adidas is taking its footwear to space. The sportswear giant announced on Tuesday a multi-year partnership with the International Space Station that will allow the company to explore product innovation outside of Earth.
The partnership is scheduled to begin with Adidas’ coveted Boost technology, marking the first time that any footwear innovation will be tested without the distraction of gravity. These tests outside of Earth’s gravitational pull are predicted to influence the performance and comfort of existing models and enhance innovation of new products.
Testing will begin as early as 2020. Adidas will send its signature Boost pellets and footwear to the ISS National Lab onboard a future SpaceX cargo mission where astronauts onboard the station will execute experiments to uncover if it is possible to produce Boost midsoles with regions of different particle sizes– something that scientists theorize could optimize footwear performance and comfort.
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Asos has announced that customers can now share their boards with friends and family.
The feature, launched last year to help shoppers organise their Saved Items, has a new shareable functionality, available on the Asos app on iOS.
This means users can instantly share their boards through social platforms and messaging apps, allowing them to receive feedback from friends on their curated boards and share gift ideas and wishlists.
The Pinterest-style boards are there to help consumers organise their wishlists. With over 80,000 products and over 850 brands available on its website, Asos has a massive inventory which can sometimes make navigation a struggle.
Asos said about 6 million boards have been created since the feature was launched in October last year. Customers are creating approximately 420,000 new boards each month.
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Mothercare, the baby goods retailer, plans to call in administrators to the troubled firm's UK business, putting 2,500 jobs at risk.
Mothercare has said its 79 UK stores were "not capable" of achieving a sufficient level of profitability and that so far they had failed to find a buyer. They added that stores would continue to trade as normal for the time being.
Analysts said Mothercare had been slow to adapt to competition from rivals and the switch to online retailing.
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