Boohoo and Ted Baker defy High St slowdown

BOOHOO and Ted Baker have enjoyed soaring sales in another sign that shoppers are abandoning the High Street to buy online instead.

Fast- fashion internet- only retailer Boohoo unveiled revenues of £183.6m for the three months to May 31 – up 53pc on a year earlier.

Luxury clothing chain Ted Baker said revenues were up 4.2pc in the 19 weeks to June 9, helped by online sales soaring more than 30pc.

The business stressed it was also boosted by its wholesale arm, which puts clothes into other retailers’ outlets, and by its low number of bricks-and-mortar shops.

The High Street is suffering with 30,000 jobs lost or under threat this year. The traditional players struggle to compete with the convenience of shopping from home and are saddled with the huge costs of running stores.

Mahmud Kamani and Carol Kane, joint bosses and founders of Boohoo, said the scale of the revenue ‘ is aligning with our ambition to become one of the dominant global online retailers’.

Kamani, 53, whose father was a Kenyan immigrant who started out selling handbags on a market stall, is worth £1bn.

Kane, 51, who lives with her husband and four Jack Russell dogs, is worth £120m. She grew up in the North East and worked as a fashion buyer in Hong Kong before being hired by Kamani to work on his family business supplying clothes to other retailers. They launched Boohoo together in 2006.

The retailer has just launched a tie-up with US reality TV star Paris Hilton ( pictured) and focuses on products worth £20 or less. Its website saw revenues rise 12pc to £97.2m, but the biggest growth in the quarter came from its Pretty Little Thing site, which was set up by Kamani’s sons and bought by Boohoo in 2016. Pretty Little Thing is focused on women aged 16 to 24, and sales rocketed from £30.7m to £79.2m.

The firm’s Nasty Gal brand, a US retailer Boohoo bought out of bankruptcy in February last year, saw sales more than double to £7.2m.

At Ted Baker, which began in Glasgow in 1988, retail sales were up 0.7pc with online sales climbing 33.6pc. Wholesale sales climbed 14.2pc thanks to high demand from other retailers for the label.