Hello and welcome to the Boozt Audiocast with Teleconference Q3 2021. Today, I'm pleased to present CEO Hermann Haraldsson and CFO Sandra Gadd. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in a listen-only mode, and afterwards, there will be a question & answer session. Speakers, please begin your meeting.
Good morning and welcome to our Q3 of 2021 webcast. I think we just should dive right into the first slide, the key highlights. Basically, to start off with, I would like to say that our department store model is paying off. We can see that our categories are growing at a high pace, and we still are benefiting from a high basket size and lower return rates. Now with nine strong months in the books and the fourth quarter performing as expected so far, I'm pleased that we can reconfirm our already upgraded outlook for 2021. We grew 31.1% in the quarter compared to 2020, and on a two-year stack, we grew 61.2%.
Looking at our two business segments, boozt.com, we delivered a very strong performance in boozt.com with good momentum throughout the quarter. Booztlet was a bit on the soft side, mainly due to less availability of goods compared to last year. We still have very ambitious growth targets for Booztlet, both for the Nordics as well as outside the Nordics. To carry that out, we are in the process of building the organizational capabilities as well as capacity to make sure that we have the right and enough resources. On the one hand, to secure stock, but also to build the brand. Currently, this is one of our key focus areas as we believe Booztlet is this highly unique concept in very high demand.
For the first nine months, growth was also 31.1% compared to 2020, and on a two-year stack, growth was 61.9%. We are very pleased with the level of profitability for the quarter. Adjusted EBIT margin was 2.0% in a quarter that is normally quite weak, usually basically the weakest quarter. For the first nine months of the year, our profitability was in line with last year with a margin of 5.3%. Restrictions continued to impact the Nordic markets for most of the third quarter. Finally, luckily you might say, all restrictions were more or less lifted in our core markets by the end of September. We expect a positive impact on the overall demand for fashion for the coming period.
We have managed to avoid any significant or meaningful delays in delivery of the Autum- Winter 2021 season, despite the ongoing challenges with supply chains worldwide. I believe that we have positioned ourselves quite well for the rest of the year as well as for Q1 next year with some very strong inventory position. Finally, we have increased our fulfillment capacity by some 40%. This will provide us with some much needed extra capacity to accommodate the usual peak in sales in connection with Black Friday and Christmas sales. At the same time, we've initiated the next expansion in automation, and we expect it to be operational during Q1 and Q2 next year. This will effectively increase our capacity with more than 80% compared to Q2 this year.
Basically, this is phase V, VI, and VII in AutoStore expansion. If we move on to the next slide, the most important one, as I always say, the customer satisfaction. The customers are still very happy. Considering that we had quite a challenging quarter in our DC, our distribution center due to capacity constraints. We are quite pleased to see that we've been able to mitigate most issues and still deliver a very good service. We still have a five-star rating on Trustpilot, even though the number is slightly down. This is good and we will still work hard to maintain that customer rating. The NPS has hit another all-time high. It's very high, actually, probably higher than we should expect in the future.
To us, it means that we're able to live up to and even exceed our customers' expectations. We are very happy for the customer satisfaction. Moving on to the next slide, the order development. We can see that we've increased the number of orders with 22% in the third quarter for boozt.com, and on a two-year stack, we are up 40%. Year- to- date, we're up 23% and 43% on a two-year stack. For the basket size or average order value, we are more than happy or basically extremely happy to see that we are on par with last year, both in the third quarter as well as year- to- date. We're actually up in basket size compared to 2019. As we always say, this is where the money is in e-commerce.
We believe that if we continue to execute on our department store strategy, we will continue to have a sustainable high basket size, which basically is the key to deliver the best in class profitability. Moving on to the next slide, the cohort development. As you can see, we continue to grow our base of active customers at boozt.com. In the third quarter, we had 26% more active customers the last 12 months compared to last year, and 50% more than Q3 in 2019. At the same time, our number of orders per active customers was slightly up compared to last year but still slightly down compared to 2019. This is basically as expected as people spent overall less on fashion apparel during the crisis, but many more bought online, and probably for the first time.
Our true frequency has recovered since last quarter and we now are on par with previous year. It's good to see actually that the cohorts of 2020, which basically were forced online, continue to behave in line with what we have seen from previous cohorts from previous years. Basically, this also tells us that it looks like the changed buying habits during 18 months of Corona, meaning higher online penetration, it will probably stick. By the way, the graph excludes the fair use customers, who I believe rightly should be named unfair use customers or serial returners, so j ust to make that clear. There's nothing fair about that. With those words, I would like to hand over to Sandra for some perspectives on the financial reports.
Thank you. If we look at the group results, we managed to grow net revenue with 31.1% in the quarter, as Hermann mentioned. Growth in local currency was 32%. For the first nine months, net revenue growth was 31.1%, while growth in local currencies was 34%. Return rates remained low during the third quarter and benefited from the continued diversification of sales. Compared to last year, the return rates was around 4 percentage points lower this year, both for the quarter as well as the year- to- date. Compared to the first nine months in 2019, return rates are approximately 9 percentage points lower in 2021. For our biggest categories, the women's and men categories, the growth rates increased throughout the quarter. Demand in these categories continued to be impacted by restrictions in most Nordic countries throughout the quarter.
However, all restrictions were lifted towards the end of September. The kids, sports, beauty, and home categories continued the outstanding performance and delivered strong revenue growth throughout the quarter and further diversified our sales to the benefit of a lower sustainable return rate for the group. In the third quarter, with our recovery in Finland, and continued strong growth in Denmark and Norway. Year- to- date, Denmark and Norway are the strongest growing countries. The growth margin came in strong at 40.4% in the third quarter, up almost 5 percentage points compared to 2019. Compared to 2020, it was roughly 2 percentage points lower, impacted negatively by the written down inventory that was sold partly during the third quarter last year, as well as the extraordinary level of campaign buys in 2020. We had expected the Nordics to be without restrictions for most of the quarter.
However, this did not materialize, making it an even more significant achievement that the sale of the spring/summer inventory materialized according to our plan. Year- to- date, the gross margin is up 0.7 percentage points compared to 2020 and around 2 percentage points compared to 2019. We expect the gross margin to be on par with the 39% to 40% for the full- year as we have previously communicated. The adjusted EBIT margin was 2% in the quarter, a decrease of 5.4 percentage points compared to last year. Historically, the third quarter is a weak quarter from a profitability perspective, with the exception for the extraordinary 2020. Compared to 2019, this year's 2% is an improvement of 5.6 percentage points. For the first nine months, the adjusted EBIT margin was 5%, which is on par with last year.
Excluding the effect from the IFRS revaluation of a lease contract last year, the adjusted EBIT margin was 0.3 percentage points lower than last year. If we're able to deliver profitability around the same level as last year, despite our increased investments in marketing and staff, is a strong testament to the sustainability of our business model and puts us in a very good position to meet the ambition of significantly outgrowing the online Nordic market. If we move to the next page, we can see that the revenue growth for boozt.com was 29.6% in the third quarter compared to 2020 and 49% compared to 2019. Negative impact from FX was around 1 percentage point in the quarter.
We're pleased to see that the true frequency was on level with previous years and the fact that the 2020 cohort continues to behave as previous cohort. A verage order value was on par with last year at SEK 807 and slightly increased compared to 2019. The continued execution of our department store strategy with a higher share of kids, sports, beauty, and home continues to result in lower return rates, which has a positive impact on average order value. This continues to be partly offset by less sales in occasion wear categories where items typically have a higher average price. For the first nine months, the average order value was on par with last year.
With all restrictions lifted in the Nordic by the end of September, we are optimistic for the fourth quarter, and we have secured a confident inventory position for the AB 2021 season. Moving on to the next page, we see that Boozt grew 39% during the quarter and 40% in local currencies. During the first nine months of 2020, Boozt performed exceptionally well and had access to low-value stock after we had performed the extraordinary write-down in March of 2020. In addition, Boozt had high availability of campaign stock due to the lockdown situation. Measuring on a two-year stack, we have managed to deliver growth of 233% compared to the first nine months of 2019, amounting to a compounded annual growth rate of more than 80%.
Growth in the Nordics was 31% in the quarter, mainly driven by Sweden and Norway, while rest of Europe grew 193% in the third quarter. Average order value increased significantly to SEK 714 , an increase of 7.2% compared to last year with consumers putting more items in each basket. Year-to-date, the average order value is slightly higher than last year, a level that we're very satisfied with as it enables a strong foundation for profitability. The adjusted EBIT margin was a negative 0.6% in the quarter and a positive 4.8% for the first nine months. The third quarter was impacted by increased investments into offline marketing to further build the Boozt brand, as well as strengthening the organizational setup.
If we move on to the next page, we see the development in the cost ratios for the third quarter. The fulfillment cost ratio was 12.2%, which is an increase of 0.7 percentage points in the quarter. During the third quarter, our operations were running at more than full capacity in relation to storage, which impacted the cost ratio negatively due to the need of additional workforce to handle more processes manually. The tight capacity situation was partly offset by a lower cost per hour for personnel working in the fulfillment center, along with lower return rates. The lower cost per hour for personnel is an effect from the insourcing of personnel in January 2021. Our personnel in the BFC previously worked for a third-party provider. Year-to-date, fulfillment cost decreased with 0.3 percentage points to 11.6%.
The improvement is mainly related to relatively lower distribution costs while fulfillment costs were slightly higher than last year. The recent expansion of more than 40% of our automated storage and goods-to-person solution will provide the capacity we need to handle the upcoming peak season. Th e next phase of the expansion in the first half of next year will provide headroom for further growth in line with our expectations. The marketing cost ratio was 12% for the third quarter and 10.7% for the first nine months. The increase is related to offline marketing to further strengthen our efforts to become a Nordic household brand. Online marketing spend was on par with last year's spend as a percentage of revenue.
Historically, our marketing ratio has been around 10% on a full- year basis, and this is also the expected level for the immediate future. The adjusted admin and other cost ratio increased with 1.5 percentage points in the quarter to 10.7%. Of this increase, 0.8 percentage points is related to investments in new employees as we're building our organization to support further growth. In addition, we have some negative effects from FX and some one-off costs in relation to the acquisition, which has impacted this quarter negatively. For the first nine months, the adjusted admin and other cost ratio was 9.8%, an increase of 0.3 percentage points. The continued investments in personnel during 2021 impacted the cost ratio negatively with 0.5 percentage points.
Our ambition to grow at a high pace and take market share requires us to continuously invest in people. As we continue to grow, we expect to gain scale advantage and thereby leverage on these investments. The adjusted depreciation cost ratio increased with 0.2 percentage points to 3.5% in the quarter but decreased from 3.2% to 3.1% for the first nine months of the year. As we will continue to invest to secure more capacity in our fulfillment center, we expect this ratio to increase at the current growth rates, and we estimate that the ratio should be around 3% to 3.5% on a full- year basis.
Moving on to the next slide, we see that the net working capital increased from the historically low 0.3% to 9.7% of last 12 months net revenue. The increase compared to last year is strongly impacted by the situation where campaign inventory constituted a relatively higher share of the revenue to compensate for the low inventory levels last year. What also needs to be put into consideration is the overall delay that we, as well as others, are experiencing in our supply chain that made us do larger upfront investments in inventory for the fourth quarter of 2021 as well as for the first quarter of 2022 to secure stock for continued high growth coming into next year.
Compared to 2019, the ratio is down 1.5 percentage points and this benchmark is also more relevant due to the relative size of upfront buys ahead of the AB season. We believe that the current level is healthy, given our focus to hold a strong and attractive selection of inventory for our customers and the ability to continue to grow at a high rate. Moving on to CapEx, the total SEK 191 million in the quarter, where SEK 20.5 million is related to intangible development . The level of intangible development CapEx was slightly higher in the third quarter compared to the previous quarters, as we continue to invest in our own developed infrastructure to support the rapid growth and continued ability to scale.
Investments in warehouse automation of SEK 170.3 million is related to the continued expansion of AutoStore and surrounding facilities to strengthen productivity. AutoStore phase V and VI was installed during the quarter and became partly operational by end of September, with the remaining capacity going live in October. We have successfully pushed forward additional investments in AutoStore to secure an additional capacity increase of 40% compared to end of Q2 2021, effectively increasing our automated fulfillment capacity with 80% in combination with the recently installed phase V and VI. As we communicated last quarter, this will have an impact on our CapEx in 2021, and we at that point said that effect could be around SEK 200 million.
Our current assessment is that part of this will impact 2021, but that depends very much on the timing of the construction, which is currently difficult to predict due to the ongoing supply chain shortages. Total CapEx will likely be between SEK 400 million and SEK 500 million this year, depending on the timing of the construction. From an operational point of view, this is to secure capacity for 2022 and 2023. To secure availability, we need to, from a financial point, commit an upfront payment that is significantly higher than with previous AutoStore build-out phases. Even though this build-out would be operational first in the first half of next year, CapEx will be affected already in 2021. This will reduce CapEx for next year correspondingly.
The operational cash flow for the third quarter was a SEK -81.5 million, that is to be compared to a positive SEK 160.2 million last year, highly impacted by the changes in net working capital. The outflow is mainly due to intensive stock building that has secured us a constant inventory position for the fourth quarter of 2021 and first quarter of 2022 in order to support our growth ambitions. This concludes the financial update, and now I would like to hand back to Hermann.
Thank you, Sandra. If we go over to the next slide, kind of here at the end, I would like to take the opportunity to share a status on what was our key ambition when we launched booztlet.com 10 years ago. From day one, the goal was to create the modern Nordic department store. It would be an online version of the classical department store we all know and that some of us really loved back then. Curated as before but not limited by any physical constraints, locations, or geographies. This is why we have those categories like kids, sports, beauty, and home, alongside the women's and the men's categories.
Actually, this is also why we believe that we have quite a good hedge towards changes in consumer behavior, changes as we have seen over the last 18 months. If you take occasion wear as an example, both women and men have been buying much less occasion wear during the last 18 months during the COVID crisis. But what we can see is that we've not been as hard hit as we've been able to sell much more kids, sports, beauty, and home. This is the reason why we've accelerated our growth, and this is also why we have a higher profitability than most, if not all of our peers. We're not there yet, that's important to say, but I believe that we've laid a very strong foundation.
I'm quite confident that we now have categories that are becoming destinations in their own rights. Why is this important, you might ask? Well, it's because it provides a unique potential for value creation. We believe actually that the evidence is quite clear with our basket size being best in class, along with superior unit economics. Last but not least, it actually increases our addressable market. We still have a lot to do but we've taken some important steps in the right direction. We'll continue to develop our business model further but with the same ambition as always. If we go to the next slide, the last one, our outlook. As we have continued to deliver in line with our upgraded expectations, upgrade from August, we are pleased that we can reconfirm the outlook for 2021.
When we set out for 2021, we expected growth between 20% and 25%. In August, we saw that we were ahead of our expectations, so we upgraded our revenue guides quite a bit. This is still the case. We are still ahead of the expectations set by the beginning of the year. I'm very happy to reconfirm our 27.5% to 30.5% growth guidance. This means in pure numbers that we expect to deliver between SEK 1.2 billion and SEK 1.4 billion more in net revenue than the last year. We can also reconfirm the already upgraded outlook for the adjusted EBIT margin with an expected margin of above 5.5% for the full- year. And as before, our medium-term financial ambitions remain unchanged.
This concludes our presentation and I would now like to hand over to the operator to get the Q&A session going. Thank you.
Thank you. We're now ready to take your questions. If you wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad now. Our first question comes from the line of Daniel Schmidt from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, Hermann and Sandra. I hope you can hear me.
Yes. Good morning .
Morning, morning, a couple of questions from my side s tarting with the warehouse. Y ou state in the report and also in your presentation that you made great progress when it came to the capacity expansion as of late in September and in October. As I get it, you've added 200,000 bins, and of course, you had some difficulties during the quarter when it comes to delays and handling costs and as you mentioned, more personnel, and so on. Should we then expect fulfillment costs to come back down again as a percentage of sales in the coming quarter and into 2022?
Yeah, that's a good question. As you said, we are running tight with capacity and are expanding, and we continue to expand the AutoStore during 2022 with actually seven, phase VII ongoing. Of course, over time, we expect fulfillment costs to come down again, but again, we are still growing considerably faster than expected one year ago and two years ago. W e have stabilized the costs and are getting costs so we expect it to go down.
I think it would be a bit maybe too ambitious to expect huge improvements in fulfillment costs going forward because we are, you know, it's a catch-up game with sales revenue growing fast and trying to basically get bins, aluminum, and robots ready for warehouse. I'm quite confident that the situation is stabilized and improving, but seeing significant declines in fulfillment costs, don't expect over the next six months.
If I may add, I think also since we are running this very big AutoStore solution and it's the biggest one that there is out there, and we're also operating with new categories and stuff, we're really, you know, we need to have room to test things and make sure how can we run this in the most efficient way long term. We allow ourselves to test things and that has some implications on manual costs sometimes. We need to build a setup that is long term very efficient. We prioritize that instead of lowering fulfillment cost in a separate quarter. As Hermann says, looking longer ahead, this is what our expectations are. It should be around 11% to 12%.
For the full- year, yeah. All right. Are you saying that even though you've installed these bins, you're still sort of running with extra personnel be cause you want to get it right given that you're entering the peak season, and you want to be on the safe side?
Y ou have to be ahead of the curve and our congestion has come slightly at the expense of delivery speed and you just can't sacrifice customer satisfaction. We would rather overinvest short term in the warehouse capacity to make sure that we can live up to our promise of being the fastest, clicks, you know, or fastest ones delivering in the region. We would rather like to be on the safe side, but we are very confident that we will kind of hit our target of 11%-12% fulfillment ratio. That's definitely going to be the case.
Okay. You said that at the start of the call, Q4 is performing according to plan. If you look at sort of just scrape data from the web, it looks like site visits picked up quite a bit in October versus a quite poor September. Is that aligning with your view sort of going into the last part of this year?
Yeah. A gain, you know, it's you know, basically everything is decided on Black Friday and Christmas Day. It doesn't really make sense to start and talk about, you know, current trading because, you know, basically, you know, unless yeah, so basically it's Black Friday and everything. It's going to plan, according to plan. We've maintained the guidance but we're still awaiting the Black Friday to see kind of to have any conclusion. We don't have any opinion on current trading because, you know, it's everything is decided over the next four weeks.
Okay. I don't know if you you look at competitors a lot, I know that, but we did hear sort of Zalando mentioning that they had a slow September, and then they had a quite sort of a good recovery in October b ut you don't want to confirm that. You're basically saying it all depends on the end of November.
I think we really would hate to comment on individual months because, you know, everything depends. It could be timing, it could be season, it could be weather. Basically, things are going according to plan. We are quite confident that we will deliver on our guidance and looking forward to the next four weeks as we are in a very good shape with a lot of inventory, in a strong position. Category is strong, so we are confident, but I think it's a bit silly if we talk about it now.
Okay. Yeah, yeah. No, but I hear you. That's fine.
Yeah.
Last question, then moving on to Booztlet. You're saying that you're building the organization for the future, of course, and you also had quite a bit of an increase in offline marketing in this quarter. B uilding the organization, you don't do in a quarter, and that's going to take maybe probably longer. Should we expect the offline marketing to stay elevated as well in the last part of this year into 2022?
We want to invest in the brand because it's extremely strong position. They got a lot of tailwind from Corona last year. Booztlet had asked they could participate in Booztlet campaigns, et cetera. Now, Booztlet needs to kind of live more on their own. We need to build the brand. We need to get access to inventory. We will continue to push Booztlet. I think that already now it's by far the biggest outlet in the Nordics in our categories. We want to keep on expanding that and also outside the Nordics. We will continue to invest.
Yeah and t wo very short ones as well. You mentioned transaction costs in the quarter for Rosemunde. How much was that? Secondly, if we get CapEx close to sort of SEK 400 to SEK 500 this year, do you have any guesstimates for next year?
Okay. We start with Rosemunde. We have said that it will be around one percentage point of the revenue for the full- year. That implies, you know, as we have them for half a year, it implies approximately 2% for the third and the fourth quarter, and that's kind of the case. Looking at CapEx, n o, we don't have an estimate for next year at this point. It is very much a game where we need to know when, the timing of supply, and aluminum, and all of that. We need to know how much earlier do we need to secure this capacity. It's changed quite a lot over the last year. We need to come back to this. That's also why it is hard.
You should think that it's quite easy to predict the rest of the year but it really is the timing between December and January here. We need to come back on 2020.
Yeah. I think you got me wrong there, Rosemunde. I think you said you had transaction costs for the acquisition in the quarter and how much was that?
Oh, okay. Sorry. 2 million, a pproximately 2 million.
Okay.
Sorry.
You also said the CapEx will be reduced next year, but you don't know how much basically.
No, it's more like if we take something into 2021. It, obviously, won't come in 2022.
Right.
It's more plus and minus like that.
Yeah. Okay, thanks.
The next question comes from the line of Niklas Ekman from Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Thank you, a couple of questions, and f irstly, if we can talk a little bit about pent-up demand that you mentioned here in the report. You talk about how pent-up demand was delayed, you expect it to materialize. At the same time you say that you confirm that the restrictions eased towards the end of September. Wouldn't that mean that the pent-up demand would likely have started to materialize already in October?
That's a fair assumption, Niklas. I'll try to get away from commenting different months. You won't get a comment on that. Of course, we can see that for instance, occasional wear women is increasing, so women start buying again. Men are holding a bit back because, you know, we only buy when it gets cold. Of course, you know, we're expecting the quarter to get back to normal, people socializing. There's nothing changed there. The only thing is that kind of the pent-up demand probably is slightly later than we expected. We are, yeah, as I said, feel confident going into Q4 and maintain a guidance that has a quite a high growth compared to last year.
That's how, t hat's my best answer, Niklas.
Yeah. Fair enough. On that topic, you talk about having a full supply and, you know, being fully stocked, and at the same time, you know, this demand has come stronger than expected. Is there a risk that you have a little too much occasional wear? I assume that occasional wear is also products that have maybe a shorter life cycle compared to other product categories. Is there any risk that you will have, you know, too much inventory going into the season now?
Yeah. Starting with kind of your last comment, the good thing is that we are in the mid to premium segment. The items typically have a much longer lifetime than the cheaper fast fashion items, which is also why people are selling them on ReBoozt. I think our stock position is good. Our sell-through is on par with 2017, 2018, and 2019. 2020 last year was characterized by basically that we had too little stock at the end of the quarter. I think that we're in a good position. We are not more concerned than before that we have too much stock. I think we're in quite a good spot at the moment.
Very good. I'm curious about your margin target. You're reiterating the guidance here of a margin of at least 5.5%. For you to reach a 5.5% margin, your Q4 margin would have to drop 3 percentage points relative not only to Q4 of last year, but also to 2019. In Q3 now your margins improved quite a bit. I'm wondering, I recognize that there's a lot of uncertainties here surrounding Black Friday and Christmas, but is there any reason to assume a margin contraction in Q4 versus 2019?
I think kind of the reason why is the uncertainties I talk about. Y ou don't know what's happening, y ou know, we're still getting out of Corona with where we don't know kind of how is the supply versus demand. At the same time as we're investing, we're investing a lot in Booztlet. We're investing in booztlet.com, we're investing in staff. I would say that we have been under-investment all around the company during the last 18 months because we were taken by surprise with the growth. We need to get back on track and invest for the growth that we want to take ahead.
We have actually no ambitions of getting close to 6% or 7% in EBITDA margin because that would be foolish, because that would come at the expense of growth. That's why, you know, I would rather spend more on marketing and for both Boozt and Booztlet in the quarter than putting on the EBITDA because this is where the money is long term.
That's a very, very fair point. Thanks. Also curious on private label, I noticed that you have launched, I think it's slippers under the Little V and Enkel brand names, which are your new private label brands. I assume you're looking at expanding this assortment going forward. Can you elaborate a bit here on your private label plans?
Yeah, this is, you know, when we bought Rosemunde that was kind of the target was to get some competencies to be able to kind of introduce some own brands, and Enkel and Little V are the start. This is kind of dipping our toes, being on the safe side. Also, you know, it's there is always kind of lead time, so it's probably the slippers is probably the ones that have been produced the fastest and quite complementary to what we've been doing with Rosemunde. This is kind of a start in the process of building and set up a small organization for our own brands, but don't expect it to be a huge part of our business in the near future.
It's just kind of, as we said, dipping our toes. Rosemunde has been, as we've seen, as good as we had hoped. It's been a promising start, but we're in a, i t's very early days.
Very good. Thank you for taking my question.
Welcome.
The next question comes from the line of Magnus Jensen from SEB. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and good morning, a couple of questions from my side. The first one goes to sort of the expectation of a pent-up demand coming through. How will this be impacted if it seems like in Denmark we're about to reinstall the Corona passport and maybe also other restrictions. How would that sort of impact your expectations at least in Denmark going into Q4?
Magnus, that's a good question, actually. Yeah, you know, I don't really know. You know, it's kind of a soft measure if you ask me, you know. It's not a big disruption to have to show a Corona pass that you're vaccinated or something like that. So personally, I don't believe it will have a lot of impact on people's social behavior, at least with the kind of if you talk about private parties, et cetera. Of course, you know, if you have increased restrictions, lockdowns, you know, it can go both ways. It can favor us, because then people have to do their Christmas shopping, Black Friday shopping online.
If anything, I would say that if you have more concerns about the disease, you are probably more inclined to buy from home during Black Friday, avoiding large crowds than the reverse. If anything, it might be slightly positive, but I don't think it's going to have any impact if you ask me.
Okay, t hank you, m akes sense. A question to Q3, I remember you saying at your last conference call that you ended the quarter at sort of around 40% growth, but nevertheless, you ended up reporting around 30% growth for boozt.com, that is. Has there been a slowdown through the quarter? Anything worth noting on this development throughout the quarter?
I think, you know, the main reason is that the comps for July last year were quite easy. July last year we basically had run out of stock, t hat's the thing. We haven't kind of, t he quarter has actually progressed as we expected. That's why it doesn't really make sense to talk about neither acceleration or slowdown. It's been a relatively smooth ride if you ask me. Also, normally we talk about Q3 being the most boring quarter because nothing really happens. And that's apart from our work in the warehouse and try to get kind of the robots installed, that has kind of been the biggest thing. You know, other than that, it's been going according to the plan.
Okay. Another one to Q3, i n Q3, sorry, in Q2, you talked about sort of have almost been too busy and not being able to maybe fully deliver in terms of demand. Has that had any impact on the third quarter?
Can you say that again, please?
Yeah. In the first half of the year, you talked about being extremely busy and the warehouse really working up to 100% and not maybe being able to meet all orders. Has that been an issue in Q3?
That was actually the main issue because we actually, you know, ran out of capacity in Q2 in the warehouse. We were supposed to have automation installed before summer, but due to delays, it was delayed, you know, installation. This is why we've been frantically working on it because it's exactly busy. It hasn't, you know, meant that we have been kind of holding back on orders or have lost sales, I believe, but it just meant that our deliveries were slightly slower than we would like them to be.
Okay, that's clear, and then j ust a final one. You talked about your sort of other categories, kids, sports, and beauty, and home doing pretty well. Could you say how much those categories represent today in terms of revenue and maybe comment on the growth rates for them?
We don't want to disclose the categories because we want to keep it kind of our private thing for the moment. I think the best indicator is that the women's categories share of our total business is now in the mid-40s, you know, and two years, three years ago it was I think in the 60s. I think that's the best example of what a big shift there is, you know, and taking into consideration that the home category was launched one year ago, approximately. Early, we did a lot of mistakes in the beginning, but are now on a really good track, and then j ust kids and sports performing outstanding.
I think that is a good proof that our department store strategy where we haven't been so vocal about the department store because it hasn't been so kind of popular to talk about it, but it actually people are embracing it with us doing this curated thing and trying it ourselves. I think kind of the categories have been doing amazing, and I think that's why we are growing more than most of the other inventory taking businesses in our industry.
Okay. Thank you for your answers.
You're welcome. Thanks.
The next question comes from the line of Peter Testa from One Investments. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for taking the question. F ollowing on from the point on the new categories. You gave a sense that there's a better return profile because of the nature of the categories. I was wondering if you could give any sort of sense looking at your, you know, KPI on slide five. If you look at you know the source of active customers, are they increasingly being sourced from these categories o r are those categories basically going back to your existing customers and increasing frequency? T o try to understand how they bring in some of the other metrics, please.
Yeah. Basically it's, you know, the new customers we're getting are very close, are very similar to the old ones, and we're still recruiting a lot of new customers from both outlets. The good thing is that our customers are embracing the new categories. As before, I think it's some 67% of our beauty baskets are combined beauty and fashion baskets. For home, the number is around 60%. Meaning that if the current customers and of course our best customers are the ones buying across all categories. I would say that, you know, it isn't until now that we are getting confident that our categories are becoming destinations in their own rights, meaning that you would be able to recruit directly through the categories.
I think that kind of up until this year at least, and now it has been that kind of our people come here for the fashion and beauty, but during Corona, they've increasingly been recruited because they were buying into the sports or the kids category and then have discovered our beauty and home. But it's, I think it's a bit too early to say that home and beauty are destinations where we recruit customers for the rest. I think that's likely to it. That's, of course, the target all the time, and we're quite confident that we'll get there.
Okay. Sort of related to that on the investment side, I mean, when you look at the fulfillment investment and also some of the personnel investment, to what extent are they sort of behind broadening the skill bases here or managing complexity that the different shapes and sizes of the product categories might bring?
It's a combination, you know, both for the home category and the beauty category. Of course, we have staffed up. It's actually not so much because of complication because, you know, it's not that complicated. It's more that we have needed to have F&F buyers and actually also category and marketing people. So I think that's kind of, it's more on the commercial side that we've been underinvesting. Of course, in the warehouse, adding home adds obviously more complexity, but still, some 85% of our stock is in the AutoS tore and 15% is outside, so it doesn't have that big impact.
Obviously, of course, we have to kind of realign the distribution center for the bit of bulky items, which is, of course, challenging, but we'd rather launch the category and then fix it rather than wait to be perfect. I think it's more kind of to accelerate our commercial part by doing the investment, not so much complexity.
Okay. Last question is just within the geographies, you talked a bit about, you know, the different you know Finland recovering say Norway Denmark. I was wondering if you could just give some comment please on Sweden in terms of how that's performing relative vis-a-vis things like active customers and maybe revenue and order just some of the metrics. Any comments you can give around Sweden please?
Yeah, as we said before, you know, Denmark was the country coming kind of fastest out of Corona, which probably because, you know, in Denmark, restrictions were eased quite fast. Sweden never really did enter any real lockdown, so it was more kind of depressed. But I think it's performed quite strongly over the last one month, two months. So Sweden is kicking back hard and then of course also now in Finland. So I think that kind of all Nordic countries are running on all cylinders if you can say so.
Yeah. Okay. That's great. Thanks for the answers.
You're welcome.
The next question comes from the line of Nicklas Skogman from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, good morning.
Good morning.
If we look at your net income, I see that basically all the profit is attributable to non-controlling interests. I was just wondering, what's the impact from acquisitions ? What was the impact from acquisition on adjusted EBIT in the quarter?
Well, as I wrongly said before when I answered the wrong question, Rosemunde, we expect that it contributes to 1% of the revenue growth for the full- year, and their EBIT margin is between 20% and 25%, and that remains still. We don't comment on it specifically on each quarter, but of course the third quarter is a little stronger than the fourth quarter for that type of business. I think you can do the math.
Yes, I can. Thank you very much. Perfect. Secondly, you talked about, you know, returns level still being low, but we've seen other players in Europe talking about return rates normalizing as societies have reopened. Do you expect that to happen now in Q4 and then moving forward, and have you already started to see any impact from the sales mix and customer behavior normalizing?
We have seen the difference in the sales mix, of course. Once the women come back, we sell more dresses, of course, the return rates increases slightly. But the diversification that we've done with the department store strategy is kind of over weighing that. Yes, we do expect the return rate to come up slightly, but as the categories continue to grow, we expect that to continue. In Addition, I think it's really hard to compare to 2019. Compared to 2019, the return rates are around nine percentage points lower, and that of course has to do with the product mix. It also has to do with our Fair Use policy.
It has to do with the continuous work that we do with the returns all the time with the pictures. L ast year we focused a lot on getting brand pictures in addition to the pictures we take ourselves. We work with the product description. It's really hard to address how much that is, you know. It's all these small changes that we do all the time. But we do a lot of work on the returns and we believe that we won't come back to the levels that we were pre-COVID, but might increase slightly compared to now.
Check. Thank you. Final question is on if you would compare your access to campaign goods. I mean, I know it was lower this year than last year, but if you would compare them to 2019. Is your access to these campaign goods still above pre-pandemic levels now or was it still above in Q3?
Yes, it's still above pre-campaign levels, and that's because basically our outreach and clout in the market, you know, we are the biggest customers of the Nordic fashion brands. We have significantly more access to campaign buys than we had pre-COVID.
Y ou don't want to attribute any of the extra access to, you know, fashion retail market overall still being slightly weaker than pre-pandemic?
I'm not sure I understand your question.
You said you still have plenty of access to campaign goods. I was just wondering how much of that you think is due to the fashion market still probably being impacted by COVID?
No, I believe I said that we had more access than in 2019. It was less than 2020. The market, generally, seems to be kind of normalizing. D ue to our sheer size and clout in the market and being a strong partner with all the brands, of course, we are the first ones to call if they have access. I'm sure that was perhaps not the case in 2018 and 2019. With regards to kind of the stock position in our campaign, which is just I think that because we are just a good partner that we're getting better access than we did pre-COVID.
All right. Thank you very much.
We have just one follow-up from Dan Schmidt from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hello again, guys. We touched upon it in the previous question, but just coming back to return rates, Hermann and Sandra, is there any way you can quantify the 9 percentage points? If you want to split that up between product mix, gender mix and Fair Usage policy? Or put it this way, how much has been attributed to Fair Usage policy and being introduced?
Yeah. Fair Use is around 1% to 2%, but the rest of the split I actually think that we want to keep for ourselves.
Yeah.
It's really the categories, you know?
Yeah.
Beauty.
The category mix is the biggest.
Kids, of course, has muscle.
Yeah.
Mens wear, yeah.
Yes.
Everyone.
If you look at the Fair Use policy implementation, have you enlarged it even further, expanded it in terms of customers that are not able to continue shopping with you compared to the start of this year?
It's more the small changes. We review how we assess this. We look at, you know, customer behaviors. We learn things all the time, but we haven't made any, like, big changes in it. It's kind of the same policy and principle, but of course, we learn along the way.
Okay. Thanks a lot, guys. That's all.
You're welcome, Daniel.
As there are no further audio questions, I'll hand it back to the speakers.
Okay. Thank you. Yeah, basically this concludes our session of today. Thank you very much, v ery good questions, and I look forward to meeting all of you during the next couple of weeks. Thank you.
This concludes our conference call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect your line.