I'm sure the announcements of successful quarters at Douglas are starting to feel a bit repetitive, not to say boring ;) Given the nature of the news this is a good thing however. To make it a bit more tangible how CEE eCommerce teams contributed to this tremendous success, let me add some of my favorite achievements from 2023:
- Baltics Integration: We applied dynamic pricing best practices and inhoused performance marketing in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia leading to significant sales and traffic increases.
- Tech: We migrated our Romanian webshop to Shopware 6 this year, a major undertaking by our tech and local RO teams resulting in improved webshop performance KPIs, several new features and a design facelift.
- Product Data Improvements: Thanks to connected databases, our CEE customers can now benefit from more & better product images and descriptions as well as onsite/mobile filters.
- Promotional Effectiveness: After best practice sharing being well established between countries already, this year we went to the next level by launching standardized promotional tools and a series of cross-regional promo tests with clear objectives and "what does success look like" KPIs.
- Logistics & Delivery improvements: In order to ensure scaleable growth, the Hungarian and Latvian team successfully moved Operations to a new warehouse last year. In 2024, we will continue to focus on improving our delivery speed and options.
- Poland: Throughout 2023, my Polish team has been contineously optimizing their marketing spend, pricing & promotional approach under new legal restrictions which at the end of the year led to record-sales on Black Friday! We also celebrated our 10 year PL eCom anniversity this year.
- Go Team CEE: Last but not least, 2023 was a big travel year with super-productive face-to-face meetings in Düsseldorf, Warsaw, Bukarest, Ljubljana, Vilnius, Riga, Prague and Sofia. All this work culminated in the definition of a 3 year growth plan I presented for 11 countries to our Douglas leadership in October. Superhappy we were able to secure the necessary investments for future digital growth in the region as an outcome :)
Go team, looking forward to 2024!
Karolina Perzyńska Denis Wanča Georgiana Popescu Máté Lippenszky Odeta Kručkienė Janine Caron Meike Grube
#TeamDOUGLAS has started with strong first quarter in the financial year!
The new year is only 15 days old and we at Douglas already have a good reason to celebrate: We have continued our successful growth trajectory in the important first quarter of the financial year 2023/24. Here are a few highlights published in our trading statement today:
+ Our Group sales (net) based on preliminary figures went up October to December 2023 to around 1.56 billion euros (+8.3%) versus the previous year.
+ Both channels have continued to positively contribute to our omnichannel success: stores sales (net) were up 7.1%, E-Com grew by 10.7% year-on-year.
+ In mid-term, we have the ambition to grow group sales (net) at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 7% and an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 18.5% with typical fluctuations year-over-year.
Regardless the difficult economic circumstances, our customers are attracted by our comprehensive beauty offering and appreciate the broad omnichannel range of brands. I would like to thank all colleagues for their great job during this important phase of our financial year. I know how intense this pre-Christmas season is like. All of you are an important reason for the very positive development of our company! #LetItBloom
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CONGRATS! They are lucky to have you!