Welcome to the Sosandar full year 2023 results webinar. All attendees are in listen-only mode, at the end of the presentation, there will be the opportunity to ask questions. This webinar is being recorded. I now hand over to Julie Lavington and Ali Hall, Co-CEOs, and Steve Dilks, CFO. Julie, over to you.
Hello, everyone, thank you very much for joining us today. We are delighted to be presenting a great set of results and also to talk to you about the exciting year ahead. Just to run through the agenda, first of all, for the presentation, we're gonna start off with the full year results to the end of March 2023. I'll give a top-line overview, and Steve will go through the key details of the financials. Then in the second half of the presentation, Ali and I are going to talk through our growth strategy for this year and beyond. First of all, we'd just like to take a moment to look back on the Sosandar growth journey. This graph shows annual revenue over the last six years.
We've had consistent growth every single year, going from GBP 1 million of turnover in 2018 to GBP 42 and a half million turnover last year, all set against the most extraordinary backdrop of multiple external challenges, from Brexit to the pandemic, to war in Ukraine, spiraling inflation, and of course, the cost of living crisis. As well as sustained growth in revenue since we launched, in the last two years alone, we've increased revenue by GBP 30 million and become profitable. We've built an entirely new brand, we've disrupted the market, and we've captured the loyalty of an underserved audience, both direct to consumer on our own website and with some of the U.K.'s biggest retailers. I'll now pass over to Steve to. Oh, sorry, slightly too early. Just to go on to last year, last year was a fantastic year.
We had our first full year of profitability, and we had substantial profit of GBP 1.6 million. Our revenue grew by GBP 13.5 million foot to GBP 42.5 million, which was up 44% year-on-year. Our business is thriving on every single channel that we sell through. All categories are selling well, including our new fast-track categories, such as smart tailoring, swim and beach, and occasion wear. We successfully completed an equity raise of GBP 5.5 million in February. We were delighted by the support from both new and existing investors in what was an oversubscribed process. The additional working capital will support the execution of concurrent new initiatives, and in particular, the launch in store with Sainsbury's in September.
We've also laid really strong foundations to achieve our ambition, which is to become one of the biggest fashion brands in the world. This time, I will hand over to Steve to go through the financials in more detail.
Thanks, Julie. Good afternoon, everybody. Starting with our net revenue, which, as Julie says, was GBP 42.5 million, up 44% on last year and up GBP 30 million compared to just two years ago. This substantial growth reflects the ever-growing demand for Sosandar product, with incredibly strong performance from both sosandar.com and through third-party web platforms. Revenue each quarter increased during the year, with Q1, Q2, and Q3 setting new all-time records, even the traditionally quieter Q4 being strong, with the month of March being 32% up on the previous year. The profit before tax number was GBP 1.6 million. FY 2023 really was a milestone year, being our first full year of profitability, with a substantial positive swing of GBP 2.2 million compared to last year.
Scale, ongoing margin, and overhead efficiencies have all contributed to this performance. Moving on to our gross margin, which improved 15 basis points to 56.2%. The improvement compared with the prior year has been delivered, whilst also increasing the proportion of revenue from the lower gross margin wholesale channel and the weakening of sterling against the dollar, which had some impact in the latter part of the year. In terms of the wholesale channel, we now have three partners, which are The Very Group, N Brown, and more latterly, Sainsbury's, which we launched in March 2023, initially on their website, ahead of a bricks and mortar launch during FY 2024. We continue to take many actions to deliver benefit and gross margin, including some targeted price increases, improved supplier cost prices, and further efficiencies in inbound freight costs.
There is more potential to further improve the gross margin that we deliver, with our target to deliver 60% on a like-for-like basis, although the actual margin that we report will be dependent on the channel mix, in particular, the proportion of the wholesale business. In terms of our overhead, our total admin expense increased by 30% to GBP 22.2 million in the year, and that compares to a 44% increase in revenue. As a result, admin expenses as a percentage of revenue reduced to 52%, compared to 58% in the previous year, reflecting the benefit of scale, whilst continuing to invest in all areas of the business to drive sustained growth in revenue and all KPIs. Our revenue growth, coupled with the slight step up in gross margin and significant drop in overhead percentage, has driven the move to profitability.
Looking at our overheads in more detail, on the left-hand chart is the absolute spend that we've incurred on our overheads and broken down by type of spend, and on the right-hand side is the same spend set as a percent of revenue. Our spend on marketing, which is in gray on the charts, continued to follow a similar strategy to the previous year, with focus on TV, social, and brochures, with peak months of investment being where the ROI is at its greatest. Overall, spend increased by 3% year-on-year, resulting in a significant drop as a percent of revenue, with the cost of customer acquisition remaining below GBP 10, GBP 20, which we are really pleased with. The cost of fulfillment, which is lighter blue on the charts, increased by 26% compared to the previous year.
This includes warehousing and customer order delivery costs. From a warehousing perspective, our 3PL partner, GXO, formerly Clipper, have continued to deliver for our multi-channel customers and have adapted the operation to manage bulk order wholesale customers, in addition to our traditional B2C demand. In Q4, we onboarded Evri as an additional customer delivery partner, in addition to Royal Mail, in order to give the customer greater choice. This has also helped reduce our average cost of delivery, which will yield greater benefit in FY 2024. The largest increase in admin expenses is from third-party commissions, which is dark blue on the charts. This increased by 59% and reflects the growth in revenue through our concession partners, who are John Lewis, Next, and Marks & Spencer.
The commission is retained by the concession partner and is reported in, within our overheads, covering all costs of the operation, including warehouse and fulfillment, returns handling, marketing, and other operational costs. The revenue and gross profit figures that we report are therefore undiluted when compared to trading through Sosandar.com. Our other admin expense, which is the gold section on the chart, includes our staff cost, which increased by 52% compared to the previous year. Our headcount increased by 24 during the year, to an average of 73, with a closing headcount still of only 85 as at March 23. The investment in people has been across all functions of the business and has included pivotal roles to equip us to deliver the growth plans in FY 2024.
Key roles that we have hired this year, or in the year, were an e-commerce director, a commercial international director, a head of operations, and a head of people. All KPIs on our own website have continued to improve year-on-year. Visits to our own site increased 15% to 15.1 million. Our conversion continued to rise to an average of 4.1% for the year, up by over 30% compared with FY 2021. Our average order value for the year was GBP 97, up 8% year-on-year. Our customers continued to shop more and more frequently with our average order frequency across all customers, increasing to 2.34x per annum.
On our own site, the total number of orders has more than doubled in the last two years, with 22% more orders being generated last year compared with FY 2022. A total of 621,000 orders were taken, with both repeat customer and new customers both increasing. Our average units per order has continued to rise, with the average for last year being 2.1, up from 1.9 last year, which is a reflection of the product choice for our customer has, and the continued availability of new product, which results in customers coming back to the site frequently throughout the year. The really important metric of marketing cost per order has continued to drop, with last year being just below GBP 6, compared with GBP 9 two years ago.
Brand awareness is now much greater, and our constant review of everything that we do to optimize the return on our spend. In summary, our income statement for the last three years is shown here. Revenue of GBP 42.5 million, which is 44% up year-over-year and up by GBP 30 million since FY 2021. This substantial increase in revenue has enabled us to deliver our first full year of profitability with a PBT of GBP 1.6 million. Finally, here's the balance sheet. As at the 31st of March 2023, we had net assets of GBP 18.4 million, compared to GBP 10.6 million a year previous, and a net current asset position of GBP 17.2 million.
During the year, our financial position was further strengthened with an equity raise of GBP 5.5 million net in February, which is enabling us to accelerate concurrent growth initiatives, including our rollout into stores through the wholesale arrangement that we have with Sainsbury's. It will also allow us to take advantage of the many opportunities that we have, which Julie and Ali will talk through in later slides. The strength of our balance sheet includes a cash balance at the year-end of GBP 10.6 million. We have no bank indebtedness. This position is allowing us to invest in inventory to support all sales channels, whilst also investing in people, technology, and operations to ensure the trajectory of growth can be delivered. We have continued to invest in stock during the year, with the balance at the year-end being GBP 12.4 million.
This includes stock in the main warehouse, at our concession partners, as well as stock in transit, which reflects the higher proportion of supply coming to the U.K. via sea freight. In addition, our stock figure also includes an increase in the right to return asset, which covers post-year-end return stock. Trade and other payables increased to GBP 8.4 million, compared to GBP 6.8 million in the previous year, which just reflects the increase in business scale. Credit to payment days have continued to move favorably, as the group becomes an ever more important and trusted customer for our supply partners. Credit insurance is now being made available as a result of our sustained financial performance over the last 18 months. Included in this increase is the provision for post-year-end customer refunds for orders fulfilled within the financial year.
This increase is GBP 0.6 million, and just reflects the year-on-year increase in revenue. Trade and other receivables increased to GBP 2.7 million from GBP 2.5 million in the previous year. This includes amounts owing from concession and wholesale customers. No change to payment terms have been made during the year, and all payments have been received on time and in full. We have delivered sustained growth over many years and have delivered strong financial performance. We are really well placed to continue our growth trajectory in FY 2024 and beyond. On that note, I will pass to Ali.
Thanks, Steve. Afternoon, everyone. Now we want to come on and talk about the key priorities for Sosandar going forward for this year, and the foundations we're laying for the years beyond. This is a pivotal year for Sosandar because we have so many major new initiatives and developments to drive and deliver our next stage of growth. Today, we're sharing five of these initiatives. In due course, we will share other ones we're working on, too. The overriding thing we want to communicate is that we are a brand in demand in both the U.K. and abroad. The world is our oyster, and we fully intend to become one of the world's biggest fashion brands. We're gonna talk about these initiatives in detail, but just let me summarize the five things that we're looking at for long-term growth. Product.
Firstly, and most importantly, we continue to constantly innovate our product range as we are nothing without great product. We are also doing a large-scale optimization of our direct-to-consumer business through sosandar.com. We are expanding routes to market online in the U.K. and also through bricks and mortar initiatives, and also international expansion, which is incredibly exciting and continues to move forward. We are expanding every single area of the business, whether it's our direct-to-consumer business or our third-party business, as well as looking at whole new routes to market. Before we go on to talk about expansion of routes to market, we want to talk about product, because none of this means anything without it. It is the constant innovation of product that will make all these routes to market a success.
Product and what our customer wants from it, is what we do and what we are really good at. To tell you about the latest innovations we're launching, we have a petite range launching in September. We have our biggest ever occasion wear launch coming in autumn/winter 2023. We're now going to produce swim and beach all year round, as it's been so successful. Our tailoring category, that didn't exist a year ago, is now one of our biggest categories. This innovation never stops, and it is the understanding of our customer and what she wants to buy, that fundamentally has made this business a success.
We're now gonna move on to look at development and expansion of our routes to market. First, looking at our own direct to consumer channel. sosandar.com is the bedrock of our business.
It's a multimillion pound turnover website that was built mobile first, with 70% of our traffic on mobile. We have industry leading KPIs, such as very high conversion rate and very high email open rates, with 50% of our revenue on sosandar.com being generated from email. Engagement with our customers is incredibly strong, and this results in high customer retention. On average, a repeat customer buys from us 4x a year. We're now at the scale where we can increase this engagement even further by using artificial intelligence to enhance the customer experience. Up until now, human beings have been able to do the best job more cost effectively than software. Now we're at a scale where software, combined with human beings, can give an even better customer experience.
We're doing two things: We're personalizing the website and our communications, and we're launching the Sosandar app. These things together will make for a better customer experience and will also give us a much more sophisticated segmentation capability, so we can target the customer more effectively. This will contribute to our growth and scale by increasing retention, and will also optimize our acquisition by getting customers to shop more regularly.
First of all, to look at personalization. We're partnering with a company called Bloomreach, who are market leading data platform providers. To explain, Bloomreach is software that collates millions of pieces of data about customers and visitors to the website, looking at their behavior and their shopping habits, and giving us the ability to achieve highly sophisticated segmentation, and then enable us to communicate on a more personal level with customers. For example, emails and push notifications can be personalized, both for content, frequency, and also time of day, and this can also be mirrored with on-site personalization. The product a customer sees can also be personalized based on past behavior.
Data has already been uploading onto the Bloomreach platform for quite some time, and we are virtually on the brink of launching and being able to begin activating the personalization, and this is gonna happen later on in July.
The second thing is we're gonna expand our shopping channels with the launch of the Sosandar app. It is already designed, looks fantastic, and is in testing phase, ready to launch imminently. Again, we've partnered with the market leader, Poq. The reason we're doing an app, although our mobile site is already really good, is we know apps are proven to drive more frequent engagement and deeper browsing experience. Basically, as it sits there on your phone, people live off their phones, and also you can use push notifications to entice the customer to buy. We know our emails are already brilliant. We get a phenomenal 50% of our revenue from them. With push notifications, this will give us a whole new way of communicating with customers with no ongoing cost. We're expecting the app to drive increased retention rates.
We already have a really loyal customer base. We are envisaging that there'll be a lot of customers who will want to shop this way. The real prize is the app and the personalization Julie has just been talking about coming together, as we can maximize the benefit of the app with the personalization capacity that Bloomreach delivers.
Outside of our own website, a key focus is continuing to expand our routes to market. In under three years, we've already built a really successful third-party business, and this has helped us to drive increased brand awareness, incremental revenue, and has helped us to catapult to profitability. Sosandar is already a top-selling brand on the U.K.'s largest womenswear retailers. We have already launched online with our new partner, Sainsbury's, which happened at the end of March this year, and we're launching a new wholesale arrangement with Freemans in September. Just to explain a little bit about Freemans, they're an online business similar to Very. They partner with the Strictly professional dancers who front their TV ad campaigns, so are well-aligned to Sosandar . They're owned by the Otto Group, who are a large online player in Europe, so also a potential partner for us overseas.
We also have other conversations ongoing. There may be other online partners to come in the U.K.
Just to reiterate why we are expanding into bricks and mortar, there was always going to be a balance of where the customer wants to shop. Following COVID, women want to shop both in-store and online. Currently, 60% of fashion purchases are in store. Why did we decide to go with Sainsbury's? Well, they're a massive retailer. Sainsbury's currently stock their own brand Tu clothing, with sales of GBP 1 billion a year, making them already the fifth biggest clothing retailer in the U.K., with a 2% share of the U.K.'s GBP 56 billion clothing market. They have a demographic perfectly aligned to ours. There are 18 million Nectar cards in circulation in the U.K. We bought into their concept of broadening their offer in store to include brands and the upmarket look and feel of their new fashion concept stores.
They are going into department store territory. The senior team heading this up came from John Lewis. With Sainsbury's, we're launching in September. Sosandar is an anchor brand. We have 150 styles going in over the autumn, winter period, and they're taking a full mix of our product categories. The nine stores are gonna be split across the country. We have really high hopes that this will be very successful. We also have other active conversations going on regarding other bricks and mortar opportunities. We are just in research mode at this point. We will update you as and when we have more information.
We've always envisaged Sosandar being a global business. We can see from the engagement we've had from potential partners internationally, that there is a huge appetite for British brands and for Sosandar, in particular. We launch internationally with our own website this month, as the Global-e integration is now complete. This will enable us to sell directly from sosandar.com across the globe. Currency and checkout is localized for over 200 countries, and Global-e will partner with us to ship stock cost-effectively worldwide. This will enable us to test the international market, trading using our existing database and giving us a low risk way of seeing where and in which countries we get traction. This is running alongside multiple conversations with potential international third-party partners. Our plan is to launch online with at least one international partner this financial year.
Just to round up what we've talked about today, it's been an amazing year, and we've had a very strong start to the new financial year, with growth in Q1 of 10% year-on-year against very strong comparators last year. We're confident in the outlook with the launch of the many new initiatives which will yield benefits in the balance of this financial year and beyond. We have a track record of successful execution, and we have the team, systems, and infrastructure in place to deliver our growth plans. The potential for Sosandar across the globe is limitless. We've built all the solid foundations of a great British fashion brand, and our constant innovation and agility means there are endless opportunities to grow the brand further.
Just three years ago, we were a GBP 9 million business sold only through our own website. Now we are a GBP 42.5 million turnover, profitable business, sold through multiple channels, and with many new initiatives about to happen, including launching both in-store with Sainsbury's and launching internationally. There's so much more to come. We fully intend to be one of the biggest fashion brands in the world. On that note, we will hand over to you to ask us questions.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. If you have a question, click on the Q&A button and type your question in. The first question asks: How do you expect to meet full year expectations of about 30% growth year-on-year, having only achieved 10% growth in quarter one?
Okay, shall I start with the answer to that question? The many new initiatives that we have coming into play are all happening right now, including the launch with Sainsbury's, launching internationally, the app, the personalization and an international online third-party partner as well, which we anticipate launching this year. With the multitude of new initiatives coming into play imminently, that's where we expect to see the results of those new initiatives, combined with an already obviously growing business, which gives us the confidence that we will achieve the consensus numbers for the full year.
It's also worth noting that quarter one last year was times were different. It was pre the rise in inflation, pre-war. When we map out the financial year of this year, that was reflected in our internal forecasting. The delivery in quarter one is in line with our internal expectations, and the way that we built the budget was that Q1 would have a lower growth rate, and that would rise, particularly from H2 onward.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. We've got a couple more questions, but if you do have a question, just click on the Q&A button and type your question in. The next question, it says: It's known that the fashion industry is a big user of water globally, and I wondered how you were developing and considering your ESG strategy.
Yeah, shall I start with that? Perhaps Ali or Steve, if you want to contribute. Obviously, it's something that we is very much at the top of our agenda, looking at how we develop this business in a more sustainable manner. It is very much the top of the agenda for all fashion companies. In terms of what we're doing currently, we do, we do adopt all the latest techniques in denim, for example, which has been historically one of the worst offenders for using water. We use many of the modern techniques for using less water in our denim. We're constantly developing products using sustainable fabrics. It really is very much an ongoing work in progress, I think, for the entire industry, not just for us.
I don't know, Steve or Ali, if there's anything that you would add to that.
I think we broaden the question to the whole supply chain, for example. I think we've spoken before in these forums around our freight strategy, we're more dominated than ever before by sea freight, which is less impactful than where the business was historically, when we used to use air freight predominantly for the movement of our product. We are also, we have implemented, consumer, and all of our packaging now is from recycled, is recycled sources. A lot of change is taking place within our business on an ongoing basis to further reduce the impact that we have on the environment in general terms.
I think we also work with suppliers now and ongoing, who have the same thinking as us in terms of forward-thinking, of sustainability, so we make sure that our suppliers are aligned with us.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. Moving on, will you need to raise additional funding to finance all these new initiatives?
Steve, do you want to lead on that one?
Certainly not the intention. The headroom that we've got on the balance sheet post the raise that we did in February, we talked at that time predominantly around Sainsbury's, but we also talked around lots of other concurrent initiatives that we had in play. Today, we're talking about some of those, not all of them, but some of them. That was always in our roadmap to further enhance the way that we interact with our customers, both on our own site and through our third-party partners. No, that's not the intention. We've got the right amount of stock coming towards us to deliver the plan, and we think that will stand us in really good stead in 2025 and beyond.
Thank you very much. Are you concerned about a potential recession in the U.K.?
I'll start with that, I think. I mean, I know we're not technically in recession, but I think anybody that's lived through recessions, it kind of feels, it feels a bit like a recession. It's felt like we've been in some sort of financial crisis for about a year, doesn't it? Obviously, mortgage rates are the thing, which at the moment are grabbing all the headlines. A year ago, it was much more about gas and electric prices. I think the external factors that we've navigated in this business, as I think I mentioned at the beginning, have been exponential from the minute.
I mean, even before Sosandar launched, we had the Brexit referendum, there's never been any kind of benign, external circumstance in which this business has operated. We've always operated in extremely difficult circumstances, and now it happens to be economically difficult circumstances. As ever, we continue to navigate, and I think we navigate well through those external factors. In terms of our own customers, have we seen an effect of economic challenges on our customers' behavior? I'd say there's no doubt about it, that the market is difficult. It's not as easy as it would be if we weren't in difficult economic times. In terms of how our customers are behaving, we've seen no specific effect on their behavior. Conversion rates have stayed high, AOV stayed high. They continue to buy high-priced products.
If anything, they're more interested in buying exciting, smart, glamorous, going out clothes and spending more money on an item, probably than buying casual wear. We've seen absolutely no difference at all in the way our customers behave in terms of spending using Klarna, for example. Klarna, which is the way that you can spread out the payments when you buy things online. With younger fashion brands, for example, they see a really high prevalence of the usage of Klarna, whereas we see very, very low. It's less than 5% of people use Klarna, and we've seen absolutely no increase at all in that over the last year, which you would expect to see, really, if our customers were being squeezed a lot financially.
We've also seen no particular change in the way they spend in the month. Typically, again, with a younger brand, you would see more of an uptick at the end of the month when people are paid and they're feeling more flush. We see very consistent behavior across the month. In general terms, no, it doesn't worry us any more than the myriad of other things that have worried us and that we've had to navigate over the last six years.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. How is input cost inflation at the moment? Is it intensifying or easing or staying the same?
Steve, to you?
Yeah, it's multifaceted, isn't it? When we talk about the cost of our stock, I think from where we stand, we've also got the benefit of scale to a degree, but also the importance on which our suppliers place on the relationship that they have with Sosandar, which undoubtedly leads to better prices. Certainly, freight has regulated, and that's come down. Also, compared to where we were in the autumn, when it felt at one point as though sterling was gonna go to parity against the dollar, it's clearly no longer there, and I think we hit a 15-month high today at $1.29. There's a lot in the pot when we talk about the inbound cost of our stock.
What we've seen is further improvements. If we look at everything together, we've seen further improvements, and that, in part, is what's helping us to drive gross margin improvement. That objective that we have initially of getting to 60% like-for-like gross margin, is being supported by improved inbound stock costings, and that will further continue. We're always active in terms of engagement with our existing suppliers and also new suppliers, not just from a costing point of view, but from a risk profile perspective as well, which we talk about a lot internally, to make sure that we're not wedded too much to one country, one supplier overly, because that's quite dangerous. We spend a lot of time making sure that we put risk mitigation strategies in place, including with our whole supply chain.
Fantastic. Thank you. It's great to hear so much good news. Could you say a bit about the things that haven't worked or aren't working, and how you're responding to them?
There's an interesting question. It's difficult, there is no big things that I would say that haven't worked. It's not like we've launched with anybody or done anything or major things. I think with running a, unless Ali or Steve, you can think of anything to jump in. running a business from a, you know, obviously, we've run this business from nothing, from being, you know, launching it in Ali's spare bedroom in London, with yellow Post-it notes on the wall and GBP 2 million of launch capital in the bank, going, "Right, we better do it then," when we had no website, no people, no clothes, no nothing.
Running, obviously, running this business to where we are now and going forward as well, it's a day-by-day series of challenges, that you're constantly navigating, running any business, but it's very difficult to pinpoint specific things that go wrong, I would say, because you get ups and downs every single day. I don't know, Ali, can you think of anything specifically-?
I would be saying, really.
Answer to that?
I think it's more, as you said, it's challenges rather than going wrong.
We're constantly coming up against things, whether it's big external things that Julie's talked about or small things within the business, you know, who do we need to hire next? What does that look like? You know, everything from right down at the bottom to right at the top. I think that's it. It's just a series of challenges that we're constantly looking at every day. We just get better at that with more experience of running this business. I think, it's more that really than it is things going wrong.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. If Sainsbury's bricks and mortar proves successful, would you consider a physical presence in other retailers like John Lewis or M&S?
Ali, do you want to take that?
Yeah, I'll take that. We never say never to anything, first and foremost, so yeah, we would consider that. Since the beginning of launching Sosandar , there was retailers who wanted us to go in-store, but at the time of that, it was just when COVID was starting, which wouldn't have been the right time to look at going in-store. We would look in-store both in the U.K. and internationally. When we're looking internationally at the moment, and we've got conversations going with partners across the globe, really. Some of those partners want online presence only, some want both, some want in-store.
With everything that we do, we look at each thing that's offered to us and see if the commercial's right, see if the way that we'd work with them would showcase our brand right, and basically, if it's a partner that we can work and grow with. We take each thing that comes across our path individually, but as I said earlier, 60% of fashion purchases are made in-store, so it's definitely something that we would consider and look at.
Great, thank you. Will your website become multi-language to fully exploit international opportunities?
Let me start with that. What we're doing with Global-e basically enables us to trade off the single website, sosandar.com, in a very cost-effective manner. What it does is it localizes the checkout for each country, but it doesn't localize the entire website, so it's effectively like an overlay. It also localizes pricing, so if you're in America or you're in Germany or wherever you are, it will be localized to you, and the checkout is localized. Working with Global-e has enabled us to do that very rapidly across the globe, at a very low cost, and to do, and to enable us to do shipping in a cost-effective manner. What we then intend to see is where we get natural traction internationally.
We wouldn't rule out having a local language website in its entirety in certain countries across the globe. That's not something that we're about to do tomorrow, but it could certainly be on the roadmap in the future.
Great, thank you. So far, have you got any information on what types of markets for international are the best fit?
Shall I start with that? We have got multiple conversations going on in every continent. Whether it be, Europe, North America, Australia, Middle East, Asia, we've got conversations going on right across the globe. Sosandar could work in any of those places, and I, and we believe could be successful anywhere across the globe. The choice for us is really about deciding where the lowest hanging fruit is, I guess, where we think we're most likely to get instant traction in the most cost-effective manner and where the best partners are. We are... But the conversations are going on everywhere.
Great. Thank you very much. Coming back to the U.K., Sainsbury's is trading in line, but can you give any further color on your interactions with them so far?
Ali, do you want to start?
I suppose the color is our relationship with Sainsbury's is really good, they're really great to work with, so everything's going smoothly since we launched. Everything's in line. They're really pleased with the performance. We've put more stock into them since we've launched, so we're beginning to see the sorts of things that sell for Sainsbury's, that sell for us. They're very similar. Now we're really just looking for getting that really big amount of stock going in over the nine stores in September, and I think that's when we'll really see how their customer responds to the range, but so far, just going offline, it's going really well, and we're really pleased with it, as are they.
Tremendous. Thank you. Across the broader picture, how important is social media to your marketing efforts?
I'll, I'll take that one. It's part of our marketing efforts, but it's certainly not the entirety of our marketing efforts. It's probably less important, I would say, to us than if we were a younger, fast fashion brand because of the nature of our customers. In terms of marketing expenditure, we spend The highest amounts of our expenditure goes on TV and brochures, which we have found with our customer demographic, is a very cost-effective way of acquiring good quality customers and also increasing retention. Social media really supports those two channels as a constantly open shop window, I guess, so it reminds customers constantly that Sosandar is there. We retarget customers by using social media when people have visited the site but not shopped, we're able to use it for retargeting.
We do also use, increasingly becoming quite effective for us is Google Shopping. As our range has got bigger, then Google Shopping is also becoming very effective, so that would be when somebody, you know, searches red leather dress, for example. As our range has got bigger, that has become a more effective channel for us. I would call it, a support channel rather than critical, I would say to what we do.
Great. Thank you very much. Are all garments still designed in-house?
Ali, do you want to go?
That one. Yes, all garments are designed in-house. We have a design team who basically design everything for Sosandar. It's not a huge design team. I think there's probably about 10 of them. They each design a different section, so be it leather or denim, et cetera. We have a head of design who oversees all that, and each product is signed off by Julie and I. Yeah, it's all original. Our prints are original as well, and I think that's part of the reason we're so successful, is that we just have a very differentiated product range that the customer can't get anywhere else.
Great, thank you very much. How do you split the roles and responsibilities between the two of you?
I think, we get asked that quite a lot.
Yeah.
I think the way we see it is the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, if I could sum it up. I think having two of us means many, many things that are... We just debate between the two of us. We're both involved in all critical things in the business, and it becomes both of our brains, I think, together to figure out how to move the business forward. We do a lot of things together as a team, I would say, and I think that makes us even better for it. It's not, it's never one person's vision, it's always the two of us, and I think that has also made for a very.
The business generally is, we very much take on board what everybody else thinks and their views, and so much of our business is collaborative. I guess we would call it a democratic business, and I think that really does stem from having two CEOs at the top of the business. I mean, if you were to kind of highlight naturally where our natural abilities are, then Ali's would be, her background's more creative, and my background's more commercial. We've always said that what's good about us is we're like a Venn diagram that crosses over in the middle. Although traditionally, I'm commercial, I've got creative skills, and although traditionally, Ali's creative, she's got very good commercial skills.
Tremendous. Thank you very much indeed. You're only targeting 30% revenue increase for full year 2024. What are your expectations for international sales contributions to revenue growth in full year 2024?
Steve, do you want to take that?
Yeah. We see the launch on both Global-e and more widely, the international strategy, as being something that will yield some benefit in FY 2024, but more importantly, it's there to drive value into 2025 and beyond. Some of the things that we're talking about here are not short, sharp benefits. They're things that are gonna create long-term value in the business by penetrating markets or approaches that will yield much more value with years to come. In terms of the specifics of the numbers, if you don't mind, I won't answer the question in a numeric form, but there will be some benefit. More importantly, we're talking about things that will yield benefit for several years.
Lovely. Thank you very much. Can you break down your current manufacturing footprint geographically in terms of %?
Steve, I don't know whether you have any specifics on.
Yeah. Yeah, that's fine.
You want to. Yeah.
We've got about 10 countries of supply when we look at the network of suppliers. The number of individual suppliers, and importantly, the number of individual factories, continues to grow. If we look at the big locations, though, I'm gonna say a third, a third, a third. I'm gonna use that for illustration. It's not quite because we've got more countries, but India, China, and Turkey are the larger countries that we've got, and they're fairly equitable if you look at it over a 12-month period.
Tremendous. Thank you very much. At this stage, a final question: Are there any plans to add men's fashion wear at some point in the future?
I think we'd say, never say never to anything. When, when we started Sosandar , and in fact, the choice of the name Sosandar , we made sure that we chose a name that meant if we wanted to grow, go across other categories, we were able to. It's always been a potential that, you know, we could move into menswear, kidswear, homewares, you know, nothing is ever off the table, I'd say, for the future. For now, we're focused on womenswear, and I think, you know, there's a very big prize to be had in womenswear, imminently and immediately, it's womenswear, certainly not off the table.
Thank you. How do you control product quality?
Ali, do you want to start on that?
On that. Internally, we have a whole team who look at fit and quality, from the beginning, we spent a hell of a lot of time on that, 'cause as we said when we launched the business, our customer is looking for really high fashion, but really good quality and fit. We knew when we launched the business, this had to be something we absolutely focused on. We had a team right from the beginning who looked at that. We also work with suppliers who we monitor exactly how their garments come in and whether they come in in the way that they should come in.
We have a whole sort of system of, if things don't come in how we want them to, then that supplier will move down the line and eventually won't be a supplier for us. We also work with suppliers all the time, every day, making sure that they're adhering to the quality that we need to. Also for our garments, we're not paying. You know, we're a mid-price brand, so we're not paying getting our customer to pay GBP 10 for a garment, so we're working with factories that are really good and use quality fabrics. Yeah, it's very, very important to us, and it's something that's monitored day in, day out.
Many thanks indeed. That's the end of questions. Julie, do you have any closing remarks?
Just to say thank you all very much for attending today. Fantastic turnout. Thanks for great questions, we look forward to updating you again in due course.
Many thanks, Julie and Ali and Steve. To everyone listening, you'll now be taken to a webpage to give feedback. If you're unable to complete it now, you'll receive a follow-up email. We'd be really grateful if you could take a few minutes to complete. Many thanks for joining us. This is the end of the webinar.