We had a great May with revenue up 7% on the back of excellent growth in May 2014 over 2013. Everyday counter card (birth to death) sales were up 25% of an excellent base, gifts up 25% – now 33% of cards, plush up 63% – not close to 50% of cards, toys up 340% off a good base – it was a stellar month.
Our focus on gross profit has continued to work with good growth there as higher margin items are in more baskets.
These results are from many small steps which is the way I like it. I don’t want success from one big single move as that is risky for the business. I prefer many small steps that feed into each other and compound to create the result I am writing about here.
I am writing about the results here to encourage newsagents to look at their year on year results, to share them and to know that we can grow our businesses and make them more valuable.
How did you do in May?
we had a great month in May. started off well with Mother’s Day cards & gifts then sales kept high for the rest of the month with State of Origin and increased foot traffic from lottery jackpots.
Very happy, everything up even lotto, newspapers and magazines!
We had a good month of May too, though foot traffic was down a little. Cards up 12%, gifts up 84% (now 39% of cards), plush up 24% (now 15% of cards), newspapers up a little, but….magazines down again, this time by 10% (happening most months), lotto up by 2%, scratchies down by 5%. Even with the lotto jackpots our foot traffic down by 9%
May up 5% with growth coming from new business products and some old. This follows 24% in April of which about half was due to the Newscorp promo but the rest was high margin growth
Great to see these results as they fly in the face of those talking the channel down.
Overall up 5%
Mags down 17%, newspapers down 5%, stationery down 4%, Gifts up 80%(now 50% of cards), plush up 13%(25% of cards), cards up 4%. Traffic about the same.
With mags down yet overall up GP is much better.
Peter great news. Traffic volume is not the gold if your GP is heading where you want it to head.
Mixed kettle of fish here.
Overall up 8%
Mags down 10%
Lotto up 10% (big jackpots)
Confectionery up 20%
Newspapers down 2%
Scratchies down 13% (not sure why – we were up 7% year on year in April)
Stationery down 8%
Hobbies up 383% ($7K worth to put it in perspective).
Sales down 6%
Average sale value up 17% (up by $1.93)
Average Item Value up 22% (up by $1.52)
My shift to diversify into the hobby lines is really starting to take off with some pretty dramatic growth that I believe I’ll be able to continue well into the coming years and is driving a much much better GP result for the business overall (much of the hobby stuff is circa 40% GP with individual item sales being as much as $200 plus).