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Chief executive and ecommerce director appointed at The White Company
Will Kernan, currently chief operating officer at retailer New Look will succeed Patricia Alford-Burnett as chief executive of The White Company in spring 2012. The apparel and homewares cataloguer/retailer, which had sales of £102 million in the year to 26th March, also announced the appointment of Barry Wyse as its first ecommerce director. Wyse joins from eCommera where he led the retail practice team, providing consulting and analytics services. Prior to eCommera, he was head of ecommerce at Arcadia and worked at Dell for 11 years. 

TP Toys in administration, Muddy Puddles unaffected 
Muddy Puddles, an online retailer/cataloguer of children’s outdoor clothing is seeking investment after its parent company TP Toys called in the administrators on 6th December. Muddy Puddles continues to trade as normal and is unaffected by the administration of its parent. Based in Kidderminster, TP Toys primarily supplies trampolines and climbing frames to high street retailers and direct to the customer. The business has operated for more than 50 years and turnover in 2011 was £12 million. It employs over 100 staff, the vast majority of which are expected to be made redundant. Administrators from Geoffrey Martin & Co are actively seeking buyers for the company’s core business, whose customers include Tesco, John Lewis and Early Learning Centre. 

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Have your say in shaping the ECMOD Awards
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.

Show your support for the Children's Hospice South West
This year, ECMOD has chosen the Children’s Hospice South West as our adopted charity. Help us raise money for this very worthy cause by bidding in our silent auction. Among the prizes kindly donated by our partners are a champagne flight on the London Eye, a table for 10 at the upcoming ECMOD Direct Commerce Awards, a four-page pullout in Direct Commerce magazine, a stand at ECMOD, and much more. Bids can be place until 5pm on Monday, 12th December. Dig deep and support a great cause; you can access the auction form here: http://svy.mk/ecmodauction.

Sales up at TM Lewin
Sales at shirtmaker TM Lewin have broken the £100 million barrier for the first time, representing a 20 percent rise on last year. EBITDA is up 5 percent to £14.7 million in the year to 26th February 2011. The company now receives 13 percent of sales from overseas. In the first half of the current financial year, sales are up 9 percent, with a 26 percent growth in international sales.

Findel turnaround on track
Revenue at multititle catalogue group Findel, which operates Kitbag and Express Gifts, was £254.6 million in the six months to 30th September 2011; slightly down on 2010, when revenue before exceptional items was £264 million. The group says its three-year turnaround plan is underway with “encouraging signs”. Pretax losses narrowed from £15 million in the first half 2010 to £10.7 million in 2011.

N Brown secures £100 million funding deal
N Brown Group, the parent company of Simply Be, Simply Yours and High and Mighty, has secured a £100 million funding deal to help the business achieve its future growth plans—in the UK and overseas. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) refinanced an existing £50 million bilateral revolving credit facility, while HSBC provided the other £50 million.

Truprint wins VAT battle
Devon-based Truprint has won its three-year legal case with HM Revenue & Customs on whether it should have been charged VAT on sales of photobooks. Truprint claimed that the tax was incorrectly applied as the items were classified as “photo albums” rather than zero-rated books. A VAT tribunal judge agreed and ordered HMRC to repay £545,800 to Harrier Truprint to cover the tax years 2006 to 2009.

Virgin Wines, Clarks go mobile
Following a threefold increase in the number of visitors to the Virgin Wines website in the last year compared to the previous year, the online wine retailer has worked with software company Mobify to create a mobile website. The new Virgin Wines mobile site offers a stripped down version of the desktop and a streamlined “My Account” facility, with further development planned to introduce auctions and to enable customers to rate their wines at a later date. Footwear retailer Clarks has also launched a mobile commerce site, designed and built by Mobile Interactive Group (MIG). Clarks’ first ever mobile site is fully transactional and carries the complete Clarks range.

For-sale sign goes up at Blacks
Blacks Leisure Group, which operates outdoor kit retailer Millets, has put itself up for sale in a bid to save the loss-making business from collapse. As at 5th December 2011, the group's net bank debt was approximately £36 million.
 
Donald Russell replatforms onto Magento
Donald Russell, a leading mail order meat supplier, has replatformed and redesigned its online shop. The new website is designed and developed by Screen Pages using Magento. Online sales at Donald Russell have been growing strongly, approaching £10 million per annum with an average conversion ratio of 10 percent.
 
Profits slump at Arcadia
Although Arcadia, which operates Topshop, Burton and Dorothy Perkins, made a pretax profit of £133.1 million in the year to 27th August, the figure represents a 38 percent decline. Sales were also down, by 22 percent, to £297.4. Further, in the first 12 weeks of the current financial year, likes-for-likes are down 4.4 percent, blamed on the unseasonably warm autumn. Owner Sir Philip Green confirmed that the company will close up to 260 stores within the next three years.
 
K3 adds Shine
K3 Business Technology Group has acquired web design agency Shine Marketing. The businesses have worked closely together on a number of projects since 2009 and the acquisition cements Shine’s relationship as K3’s preferred ecommerce partner. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
 
Groupon investigated by the Office of Fair Trading
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has opened an investigation into the trading practices of MyCity Deal, trading as Groupon UK, as to whether Groupon is complying with consumer protection legislation. The investigation follows complaints the OFT has received in relation to Groupon's trading practice; it will now consider whether Groupon infringed any laws.
 
MFI relaunches online
Furniture retailer MFI, which exited the high street in 2008, has officially relaunched as an online-only retailer. The MFI brand was bought by Walker Capital, which also operates Victoria Plumb, an online and mail order bathroom retailer, in 2010. A new management team has been developing the relaunch of the MFI brand, including commercial director Adrian Storr who has 15 years retail experience, including nine years at MFI.
 
MandMDirect moves into insurance
Having launched a discount-voucher site in October, apparel cataloguer MandMDirect has partnered with ThinkInsure to create a new MandMInsure insurance website.  A range of services are on offer including life and home insurance as well as a mortgage comparison service.
 
 







November Catalogue Log
It’s official, cataloguers are discounting more heavily in the run up to Christmas. The Catalogue Log data compiled by Direct Commerce magazine shows that in November 2011, a third of catalogues (32.6 percent) feature a discount or sale on their front page. The second most popular offer was free delivery, promoted on one in five of the catalogue covers we tracked. For more stats and insight from the Catalogue Log, click here...
 
To subscribe to Direct Commerce, contact Jill Sweet on 01271 866112 or at subs@catalog-biz.com. To advertise, contact the Direct Commerce sales team on 01271 866112 or at sales@catalog-biz.com.

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