Vancouver-based womenswear retailer Aritzia (TSX:ATZ) bucked the trend of a lot of bricks-and-mortar fashion houses by increasing sales and profit, the company revealed after the markets closed on May 10.
Aritzia generated $11.5 million in profit on $196.4 million in sales in its fourth quarter, which ended February 26.
That is a 15.1% jump in profit and a 17.4% jump in revenue.
“Our strong fourth quarter and full year performance demonstrates our ability to drive consistent profitable growth,” said CEO and founder Brian Hill in a release.
“We achieved double-digit comparable sales increases in each quarter of fiscal 2017, reflecting continued momentum in our Canadian and U.S. retail stores.”
The company now operates 60 stores in Canada and 19 in the U.S.
Aritzia’s success contrasts with many fashion retailers.
San Francisco-based Bebe, for example, earlier this year said that it would close all 168 of its stores, including eight in Canada, and would continue only as an online store.
Then there is Vancouver’s Kit and Ace, which rapidly expanded to 61 locations last year before retrenching. It announced on April 26 that it would close all 32 of its stores outside Canada so it could focus on nine Canadian stores and its online store.
American Apparel, Mexx, Jacob, Danier, and Le Chateau are another handful of retailers that have either liquidated or retrenched in recent years.
Ingledew’s CEO Bill Ingledew told Business in Vancouver May 8 that he fears for the future of retail because people increasingly look at products in bricks-and-mortar stores and then order the product somewhere else online.
Ingledews is liquidating all assets in its six Ingledew’s shoe stores as well as three Ecco shoe stores that it operates as part of a store-within-a-store model.
Aritzia, in contrast, said that it is off to a strong start with spring and summer collections being well-received by customers, “putting us on track for our 11th consecutive quarter of positive comparable sales growth.”
In April, Aritzia opened a flagship store in Century City Westfield in Los Angeles, its first location in southern California. It also opened its sixth store that is branded Wilfred, in Square One Shopping Centre in Toronto. Aritzia also revamped its Richmond Centre location at the end of April.
“The company plans to open three to four new stores and expand or reposition five to six existing locations in the remainder of fiscal 2018,” the company said as part of its earnings release.
Aritzia is relatively new as a public company, having had a $400 million IPO in October. That IPO dominated the worst year in decades for Canadian IPOs.
The company's roots in Vancouver go back to 1984.
One of the company’s first stores was on Robson Street. A 1,500-square-foot space at 1088 Robson Street, between Burrard and Thurlow streets, where J. Crew now operates, opened in 1986.
Hill moved the store one block west to a larger 3,400-square-foot space, at 1110 Robson Street, in the late 1990s and then started expanding that store in both directions.
About a decade ago, he took space immediately east of his store; three years ago, he took space to the west. Then in 2015 he expanded to the east, on the corner, where Starbucks had operated for many years, to create a Vancouver flagship store.
