Ted Baker reveals plans for new stores despite £300m revenue drop

A high street fashion brand has announced that it will open 10 new stores this year after reporting that its revenues decreased by nearly half in 2020.

Ted Baker, which has stores across the UK, has seen group revenue drop by 44.2 per cent since January 2020, falling from £630.5m to £352m over the course of the year.

The company said that this was a result of the impact of the pandemic, which also affected its profits, with losses reaching £107.7m.

This comes after the company’s launch of a new restructuring plan last year, which it now says has resulted in £31m of annualised payroll savings.

However, it said that it has strengthened its brand across the year, with a larger active customer base and plans to open 10 new stores in 2021.

Rachel Osborne, CEO of Ted Baker, commented: “We are making good progress against our strategic transformation plan and Ted Baker is increasingly well placed to take advantage of the significant growth opportunities ahead of us.

“The Ted Baker brand has strengthened further, with the number of active customers growing to 1.2m by the end of the year.

“While the impact of Covid-19 is clear in our results and has amplified some of the legacy issues impacting the business, Ted Baker has responded proactively and is in a much stronger place than it was a year ago.

“During the period, we delivered robust cashflow generation, fixed our balance sheet, refreshed our senior leadership team and today we are upgrading our financial targets for the second time since outlining our new strategy last summer.

“Additionally, we have made good progress with our sustainability strategy, Fashioning a Better Future, including the mapping of all of our factory partners within our supply chain and significantly increasing our usage of cotton from sustainable sources to 69 per cent.

“We are a year into Ted Baker’s transformation plan and continue to believe that we have the right strategy and team in place to set the business up for a stronger, more sustainable future.”

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