Heritage fashion brand Cotton Traders delivered “a steady performance” for its 2023 financial year, the company said this week. That came after “its most successful financial year” ever in 2022, although that had been a 53-week year compared to 52 weeks this time.

For the latest — slightly shorter — period, turnover was down just 1.7% at £109.4 million, although operating profit fell 9.9% to £9.8 million while EBITDA was down 7.9% at £11.57 million. The firm attributed this “mainly” to the shorter financial year.

The company said the “consistent performance” was due to a combination of “heavily invested, digital-orientated marketing activity, a growth in active customer retention [up 0.9%], and investment into the brand’s physical stores”.

It was a good year on the marketing front as it saw the firm extending its partnership with TV star Will Mellor, and the introduction of two new female celebrity partnerships — broadcaster Alex Jones, and ‘A Place in the Sun’ Presenter, Jasmine Harman. The online-focused strategy helped it sustain brand awareness at 95%, “as well as reaching a new, younger demographic ensuring relevancy for the brand,” we’re told.

The company also said its online penetration grew 2.6%, “driven by continued new customer acquisition through digital channels, continued migration of traditional customers to online shopping and increased basket spend,” with website sales up 6.2% and app-based sales rising 11.1%.

Category-wise, menswear sales were “consistent”, with strong sales of shirts (+20%) and knitwear (+11%). Womenswear was stronger overall with a rise of 10%, helped by higher sales of women’s trousers (+7%), woven tops (+13%) and significant range extensions in underwear and loungewear.

The company took advantage of the bounceback in physical shopping last year, investing in its physical stores with a slight uplift in the percentage of sales coming directly from those locations (21.5% of the total, which was up 0.6%). it also said that orders in-store rose 11.4%. The brand opened 10 new shops, as well as relocating two in order to add to their selling space and refitting nine stores. It all meant that 93% of its shops (81 of them in total) were profitable.

CEO Nick Hamblin said: “It’s promising to see our investment into physical stores paying dividends with an uplift not only in sales year-on-year, but also orders in-store. The cost-of-living crisis has resulted in low consumer confidence and macroeconomic turmoil and we are so proud our customers remain loyal to the Cotton Traders brand despite the wider economic challenges. Continued customer retention, combined with an 11% increase in app sales and a growth in online penetration year on year are all testament to the success of our wider growth strategy.

“Customer loyalty remains strong, which can be credited to our competitive price point in the market and strong product offering — customer loyalty plays a huge part in purchase decisions, which is why we’ve continued to invest in the right areas to enhance all our customer touchpoints.

“Next year will see us implement our marketplace growth strategy, something we’ve already experienced success with through our full year of trading on Debenhams.com and soft launching on Freemans.com late last year.”