French retailer Beauty Success grows despite downturn
The retailer, which supplies leading specialist global fragrance brands, said its sales grew by 7.17 per cent to exceed the €200m mark, when compared to the results it achieved in 2008.
The results were particularly outstanding for the all-important month of December, during which the company said it managed to grow its sales by 10.75 percent, against national industry growth of just 0.9 percent.
Logistics play the big role
“These excellent results were attributable to a combination of efforts from our franchisees, their sales teams, our branch office and the strength of the organisation that we have built together, together with our logistics platform, which is pivotal to our service,” said Philippe Georges, president of Beauty Success.
The retailer has been expanding significantly in France during the last two years, and now holds 249 retail outlets which are run on a franchise basis.
The company has ambitions to expand significantly in the coming year, and says that there are already a further 20 stores scheduled to open during the course of the 2010 fiscal year.
Targeting 400 stores in France
Further store openings are likely to be added to this figure, particularly during the latter part of the year and the company says that ultimately it would like to achieve 400 retail outlets in France.
The company’s expansion plans run in the face of forced redundancies at beauty retail rival Marionnaud.
The perfume and cosmetics retailer announced back in December that it will make 87 people redundant in the face of a continuing poor business performance.
Marrionnaud in trouble
The announcement follows the news in October that the company was to cut fewer jobs than originally planned, with voluntary redundancy being offered to all employees.
Over the past three years, Marionnaud has experienced annual losses of around €25m, in spite of a slight improvement in sales in 2008.
However, another big beauty retail rival, LVMH-owned Sephora, has managed to expand significantly into international markets in recent years on the back of big success, with sales continuing to outpace the economic downturn during 2009.
