As Moss Bros posts a 9% increase in profits, Retail Week speaks to boss Brian Brick about challenges, opportunities and its plans for online.

Moss Boss boss Brian Brick

Why is your hire business on the up?

Moss Bros’ sales are up 7.5% as a business in the first seven weeks of this year, and hire is a good contribution to that.

We’ve introduce new products for our hires business including a lounge suite, which has been very successful and the orders are really coming in for this wedding season. This time of year is very busy with bookings when you come into Easter and wedding season starts, and that goes through to September, and between that you have Ascot.

There is a lot of people who still want a traditional morning suit to get married in, but there’s a strong trend for suits with colour – historically people haven’t been able to hire lounge suits and would have had to buy them. We’re offering the customer something that wasn’t available before and we’re seeing a change in performance and a good start to this year.

How is the wedding sector looking over the next two years?

No problems that we know of, we’re optimistic of the hire and wedding business and believe the product is the way forward. We’ll have more product next year and we’re making a large investment in the hire business. We’re changing the platform of the hire website as well to make it much more easy to navigate. We’ve learnt an awful lot over the past few years since the site has been running, so we’re very optimistic about the wedding business both hire and retail.

You were a little late to the ecommerce game – tell us how you’re now performing online?

Ecommerce grew 58.9% last year and it continues its strong growth into this year and is now 8% of total sales.

We were later than others starting, but the thing about that is we can pick up on all the latest technologies to do that.

In the past year, ecommerce total sales were 7.8%, as of the moment, and we’re growing all the time. The run rate is about 12% of sales – we’re growing fast.

We’re anxious to grow it further. And as our ecommerce offer grows larger and becomes more significant, the concept of omnichannel becomes more important and that’s a project we’ve had running for the past two years based around a single customer base, so if you buy in store we can better track and serve the customer with better offers.

So how do you intend to gain a single viewpoint of your customer across channels?

We have a single customer and the issue is having a ‘golden record’, because quite often you can find the same customer cropping up with a slight misspelling of the address, so that’s a big project to come up with that record.

At the moment we have that in place for hire, and we see a lot of people starting off online, because most people probably haven’t been responsible for organising a wedding before and they would have come into store. But the education process is starting from scratch and online now – you set up an account, reserve a package, do a lot of it online, then come into store and then the store can pick up on the progress.

The next part is on retail, we have a database of about 800,000 names, but there are lots of duplicates in there and we’ve got to go through and clean that. But, ultimately, a bit like when you go into an Apple store and are offered your receipt via email, you’ve got them then provided they’ve agreed to marketing.

We’ve introduced a product to send receipt via email, and also in the process of introducing a state-of-the-art CRM system, because obviously when you’ve got the data you’ve got to be able to manage and leverage it.

What else do you have planned for this year?

We refitted 14 stores last year with seven stores opened. We’re planning 27 store refits this year, which is an acceleration from the plan owing to the success of the refurbs we’ve opened.

What is the biggest challenge and biggest opportunity Moss Bros faces over the next year?

The one man challenge? We’ve an awful lot we’re doing with refurbs etc, but that’s not a challenge, it’s a great opportunity for us.

The biggest opportunity for us as a business is the omnichannel piece. As we start to leverage the CRM data that we have we’ll be able to talk to our customers a lot more intelligently and learn exactly what they want. For us we have so much data because of the hire, I think it’s a great opportunity for the business – it’s pretty exciting actually.