Noni B stays strong, store numbers grow, profits to surge

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jul 13, 2018

Middle-aged and mature women have not lost their love for physical shopping and mid-market fashion group Noni B is reaping the rewards. 

The group that runs the Noni B, Rockmans, W Lane and BeMe chains, said its store numbers grew by 27 to 641 in the financial year just ended as it expanded to meet demand.

In a trading update, the retail group also said its comparable sales have grown by 4.5% so far this year and that earnings would be 70% higher than last year's.

"I think it's easy to generalise, to say, 'Everyone is shopping online and therefore people need to reduce their store footprints'," Noni B chairman Richard Facioni told The Age newspaper. "In our demographic - which is that more mature female shopper - online penetration has been less, so it's been a bit more insulated to that."

The company appears to be riding high despite many of its retail peers cutting their store count in the face of online competition and the arrival of international fashion retail giants in Australia.

Facioni said that the vast majority of the company’s stores are profitable so expanding its physical footprint makes good commercial sense. 

And it has already radically expanded that footprint in just the last week as it completed the deal to buy a number of brands from lossmaking Specialty Fashion Group. In May it had announced that it would pay A$31 million for Millers, Katies, Rivers, Crossroads and Autograph. That means it now has nearly 1,400 stores, plus annual sales of around A$1 billion, and is therefore one of the biggest players in the Australian market.

But is there a danger of the company’s many brands cannibalising each other? It would appear not. Facioni also told the newspaper that "across the portfolio of nine brands that we now have there is a clear delineation between each brand. There is an overlap of customer, but she's shopping each of the brands differently for a different end use."

With that in mind, the company has forecast profits on an Ebitda basis of A$37 million for the current year.