The good news for Charming Shoppes was that the apparel marketer managed to trim its net loss for both the fourth quarter and the year. The bad news was that its overall sales were off in both instances.
Direct marketers can take heart, however: E-commerce sales for the company showed gains while comparable store sales fell.
Fourth quarter 2009 saw the multi-brand chain’s sales off by $92.9 million, a 14.7% drop from fourth-quarter 2008’s level. Total sales for the quarter amounted to $539 million, down from $631.9 million a year ago.
Between the quarters, comparable store sales fell by 12%, while e-commerce revenue rose by 10%, from $25.1 million to $27.8 million. The company closed 152 stores between the quarters.
“Considering lead times to adjust apparel assortments, our results in the fourth quarter showed only modest improvement and reflected very similar assortment issues to those we referenced in the third quarter -- a lack of focus on our customer and a failure to provide her with a strong, focused core tops and bottoms assortment,” Charming Shoppes president and CEO Jim Fogarty said in a statement.
For the year, the company generated sales of $2.06 billion, down 16.6% from the $2.74 billion it pulled in during fiscal 2008. E-commerce sales rose 6%, to $95.1 million from $89.7 million. Between the years the company trimmed its net loss from $255.3 million in 2008 to just under $78 million. Fiscal 2008’s figures include an $81.5 million goodwill impairment charge. The company recorded a similar charge of $15.7 million during the year just ended.
The current year seems to have started off reasonably well for the chain. Its same-store sales were off only 4% through the first eight weeks of the year, compared with the same period last year. And its Internet business is up 35% during the same time period, benefiting from the company’s August launch of new web sites and its February launch of a universal shopping cart which links its four branded sites.
