Lacoste UK has filed its accounts for last year and they showed a swing to a pre-tax loss of £3.269 million, even though turnover edged up slightly. It rose to £70.192 million from £69.922 million.

Pre-tax profit had been £2.456 million a year earlier. Meanwhile the net loss was £3.223 million after a net profit of £1.846 million for 2022.

The French company said retail revenue from its boutique and outlet stores increased only by a tiny 0.3%. That was despite it opening a new global flagship on London’s Regent Street in April last year, “elevating the brand positioning and highlighting the importance of the UK market to the Lacoste group”.

But the impact of the new flagship was blunted by a weak wholesale performance with the company seeing wholesale revenues down 4.5%, “driven primarily by the economic backdrop and cost-of-living crisis” that meant there was lower footfall to physical stores.

However, the company added that “the continued strategy to target mid-tier and top-tier wholesale customers” was important to the overall premium edge the brand has.

One plus point in the results was that even with the tough conditions out there, the margin was flat at 44% so the company clearly wasn’t forced into too many margin-sapping markdowns.

Lacoste said that at the start of last year, its UK operation acquired 100% ownership of Pentland Brands UK Distribution Limited (PBUKD), the licensed distributor of the brand’s footwear to the wholesale channel. PBUKD continued to be the distributor for almost the whole of 2023. But in December of that year, a sub-distribution agreement was signed between Lacoste UK (LUK) and PBUKD for LUK to become the new distributor for Lacoste footwear both in Britain and internationally from SS24. PBUKD earns a royalty from LUK and the latter recharges to the former the cost of services for operating the footwear business.

During 2023, LUK also entered a contract for a third-party logistics provider to operate a UK warehouse. This has been up and running since May 2023 and “will alleviate the risk of paying double import duties by not having to ship goods into the UK from the brand’s European warehouse in France”.