ProCook has said sales and profits for its current financial year will be behind previous forecasts as shoppers face “exceptional pressures on discretionary spend”.
The kitchenware retailer said trading in the last two months “has been impacted by increasingly challenging market conditions, with customers affected by the well-documented exceptional pressures of discretionary spend”.
This, exacerbated by trading against “exceptionally strong comparatives” for the prior year, means that, although ProCook’s like-for-like sales are “significantly higher” than pre-Covid levels, they have decreased across all channels year on year.
Against this backdrop, ProCook said its adjusted pre-tax profits would now fall between £4m and £6m in its current financial year and sales would be flat year on year.
It added that, although 89,000 new customers had shopped with the business in the first eight weeks of its new financial year, average spend, conversion and repeat purchase rates had all been hit by the looming cost-of-living crisis.
Chief executive and founder Daniel O’Neill said: “There are clear and numerous pressures on consumers at present, which are impacting discretionary spend across retail as a whole, and kitchenware is no exception.
“While we are still seeing lots of new customers discovering the ProCook brand and buying our products, it is clear that many are tightening their belts. This creates a difficult short-term trading environment, but does not distract us from our strategic priorities as we work towards our mission of becoming the first choice for kitchenware.”
ProCook’s profit downgrade swiftly follows DFS, which warned on profits yesterday as the cost-of-living crisis triggered “a change in demand” from its shoppers.
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