Sosandar: M&S cyber-attack blackout cost us £800,000 in lost sales

Speaking to Retail Week, the fashion brand’s chief financial officer Steve Dilks said that Sosandar has yet to resume trading with its second-biggest retail partner, as it was still “cautious about what the future might look like”.

“It cost us the best part of £800,000 of revenue, which for us is really substantial,” he said. “So, for a year-on-year perspective, in proportional terms, we were 15% up. It would have been 22% if M&S were trading through that whole period. It was substantial, and super unfortunate for everyone involved.

“Looking forward, in terms of when we’ll be back on the website, we don’t know. While M&S is back trading online, we’re a stock concession supplier. We’re not own label; we’re not drop ship. So, the runway for our return is slightly less known.

“We’ve not been shipping stock to the warehouse of M&S since it started, and that may not fully start again until autumn or winter when the new ranges start to drop. We’re cautious about what the future might look like, both in the near term and in the midterm as well, because we just don’t know.

“We don’t know how quick they get back up and running and we don’t know what the processes will look like. We’ve got to have a degree of caution internally, just so that we can plan.”

Despite being cautious about returning to M&S’ ecommerce platform, co-chief executive and founder Julie Lavington said that Sosandar still had confidence in the retailer as a partner moving forward.

“In terms of our trust in M&S as a partner, that hasn’t waivered at all,” she said. “We’re very happy they’re back online and we can’t wait for it to get back to a degree of normality. I think that M&S has handled that situation as well as any business could handle it”.

Pause for stores

The fashion brand has also announced that it will be pausing its store rollout ambitions, until its six existing stores were profitable.

The retailer has opened six stores since 2024, the most recent two in February. Co-founder and chief executive Ali Hall said it was “difficult to put a timeline on anything at the moment” with its stores plan, but said that market town locations were outperforming shopping centres.

“The first two market town locations we opened, Marlow and Chelmsford, are very near breakeven. We have two more stores in market towns and two in shopping centres. The two in the shopping centres are a slower burn than the ones in market towns.

“What we’ve found is that footfall is similar across all six stores, but the big difference is conversion. Conversion in shopping centres is lower than market towns. The reason we’ve seen for that is because our demographic of customer is more concentrated in market towns where they usually shop.

“In terms of future rollout, when we get the existing ones to profitability, it would be more in market towns”.