SportsShoes.com speeds to another successful year’s trading

Online retailer SportsShoes.com continues to deliver impressive performance figures with annual turnover and new customer numbers up significantly.

Turnover for the 12 months to 29 February jumped 11% to £90 million as the retailer attracted 663,000 new customers in the period.

In addition, the online running shoes, running clothing and outdoor gear retailer said it secured 749,000 orders from repeat customers over the same period.
The Bradford-based business, which retails over 17,000 products from 150 global running and outdoor brands, said the year’s performance was down to a combination of successful running shoe launches — including Nike Vaporfly 3, Nike ZoomX Ultrafly, Asics Nimbus 26 and Hoka Clifton 9 — and high impact activation initiatives.

Meanwhile, the retailer is growing international sales, particularly in France, Germany, Spain and Italy, “and [we] feel there is a clear opportunity to establish a premium online retail brand in our space in Europe and beyond”, noted MD Brett Bannister.

“Our start for the first quarter of this financial year has been a strong one as we have maintained the momentum we built up over the previous 12 months,” he added.

To enable its growth, the company said it has invested £4.6 million over the last three years in its people, processes, technologies and facilities.

During the 12-month period it replatformed its UK and European websites to provide customers with a range of online retail features and benefits. These include enhanced user journeys with increased levels of personalisation across both product discovery and product advice.

In January, it also announced an exclusive retail partnership with community event network Parkrun. Supporting more than nine million registered parkrunners across 23 countries, this marks the biggest retail partnership the company has secured to date.

In total, SportsShoes.com was involved in the delivery of more than 20 activation events over the 12-month period both in the UK and internationally.

Bannister added: “Our investments have been made to provide the foundations for ongoing sustainable profitable growth.

“We also believe it’s no fun standing still, so we are always looking at what inventive ways we can come up with for everything we do, whether it’s a product launch, brand activation or sales promotion.

“We know that if we continue to deliver fresh and exciting ideas for our customers and brand partners the sales will look after themselves.”