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Lovehoney buys Coco de Mer
Sex-toy retailer Lovehoney has bought luxury erotic brand Coco de Mer. The deal gives Lovehoney a presence on the high street through Coco de Mer's stores, selling lingerie, sex toys, jewellery and erotic art. Coco de Mer founder Sam Roddick remains with the business in an informal role, advising on positioning and product development. The deal was created and negotiated by Ranjit Singh, Coco de Mer’s chief executive, who was brought into the company a year ago in order to restructure the business for a sale. 

Sales up at Hotel Chocolat 
Retailer/cataloguer Hotel Chocolat delivered a 25 percent rise in pretax profits, to £2.6 million, for the year to June. Group sales increased 12 percent to £59.9 million and EBITDA improved 17 percent year-on-year to £5.1 million. Last year also saw Hotel Chocolat grow its UK Chocolate Tasting Club customer base to 100,000, and launch clubs in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the US. For more on Hotel Chocolat, don’t miss cofounder Peter Harris’s session at next week’s ECMOD. You can access a digital edition of the conference programme here. 

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Other News...

ECMOD Direct Commerce Awards 2012
Help us make the ECMOD Direct Commerce Awards the best yet. Taking place on 27th March at the Lancaster London Hotel, the Awards will be open for entries from January 2012. Before we finalise the categories we wanted to ask for your opinion. Please take a couple of minutes to answer just a few questions about what you’d like to see from the ECMOD Awards next year. We really appreciate your feedback. Click here to visit the survey.

Dwell grows sales, narrows losses
Furniture retailer Dwell announced that in the year to January 2011, sales grew 34 percent to £33.4 million. EBITDA was £1.1 million, compared with a £1.2 million loss the previous year, due to a warehouse consolidation. Further, pretax losses narrowed from £4.5 million to £356,000. Managing director Aamir Ahmad attributed last year’s growth to a store-opening programme, strong online sales and a focus on product development. For this year, Ahmad estimates to grow the business by 10 percent. Aamir Ahmad will be on the Power Panel at ECMOD, 30th November, Business Design Centre. For more details visit www.ecmod360.co.uk/conference.

Your feedback needed!
Affinity marketing is the coming together of two companies for mutual advantage.  It can help both companies stand out from the crowd and generate substantial rewards, both financially and emotionally.  The key to success is getting the right relationships with the right partners; if you get this right then the rewards just keep coming. Seico and Affinity Exchange will be hosting a session at next week’s ECMOD called Affinity and the Long Tail. In order to make it as interactive as possible, we ask that you help us by completing a short questionnaire gauging your views on affinity marketing. You can access the survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CATEXaffinity. Thank you!

Shop Direct invests £12 million in Christmas campaign
Very.co.uk, Littlewoods.com and isme.com, the flagship brands of Shop Direct Group, are investing more than £12 million in their multimedia Christmas campaigns. Each brand has its own individual campaign running across TV, print, online, social media and mobile.

eBay buys Hunch
Online giant eBay has acquired recommendation platform Hunch for an undisclosed sum. Hunch uses prediction technology to present customers with customised recommendations based on their tastes. It uses data from around the web, including from social networks like Facebook and from questionnaires, to make personal recommendations. Following the acquisition, eBay’s customers will receive recommendations for items available on eBay based on their specific tastes.

Transport for London: No tube strikes planned for November 30th
Following several delegates asking whether the strike action called by civil servants and teachers will affect transportation services in London during the ECMOD show, Transport for London have released the following statement: "There are no Tube strikes planned for the 30th and all of our stations and services should be working as normal.”

Pet-apparel boutique LoveMyDog relaunches website
LoveMyDog, a designer of pet clothing, beds and blankets, has launched a new website following a brand identity refresh to reinforce its high-fashion credentials. As well as new photography and a new corporate design, the site features new functionality such as “shop by look” and “shop by material”. The website uses the Bluepark platform and was designed by Matt Setchell Creative. All content was written by Words that Sell and the site was built by Sapna Group.
 
 






Five tips to ensure your website is ready for Christmas
Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat… but is your website ready for the Christmas shopping season? With over £6.8 billion spent online in the UK in the 2010 Christmas season and predictions that this will increase again this year, you need to be sure your website is up to the job. We’ve compiled five simple tips that will help website owners increase the number of Christmas visitors who become shoppers. Read more here... 

Top five affiliate marketing metrics
Just as with other marketing channels, sales volume has always been taken as the key metric in assessing whether your affiliate marketing is working. Affiliate networks’ reporting interfaces are usually structured so as to present data on sales volumes first, and then which affiliates have generated that volume. But there is more to affiliate marketing than sales volumes. Here are five metrics you should measure. Read more here...
 
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