Year-end Rally Follows Investments into Platform to Make Selling Easier
London, 10 March 2015: Spreadshirt, the print-on-demand, ecommerce merchandising platform saw sales up in December alone by 18% to 11.8m euros (£9.5m), compared to 2013. The company recorded its best ever Christmas sales in 2014; over 300,000 orders were shipped worldwide during this period. The biggest order day was December 15th with 19,200 orders.
“Platforms that help consumers and business sell and market their ideas have proven to be billion dollar businesses” says Philip Rooke, CEO of Spreadshirt. “We have created this for merchandising and design ideas in the new global, mobile and social marketing environment of today. Growth rates are going to increase tremendously in the coming years. A key success factor is creating an easy and straightforward process to upload and globally publish ideas on merchandising. We have made significant improvements to our platform in 2014 and have seen the return in increased sales. We are continuing this work to radically improve and expand on our platform in 2015”.
A major reason for the successful year-end rally was the fundamental optimisation of the mobile shopping experience. Spreadshirt responded to changing customer needs by launching a single-page checkout and a new mobile marketplace. After the launch of the touch-optimised t-shirt design tool in 2013, these were two major milestones in the Mobile Experience Project and the goals set at the beginning of 2014. In total Spreadshirt invested a single-digit million euro sum into the development of the platform. This investment also meant structural changes and improvements were made to the search function and presentation of products. This significantly improved the Spreadshirt marketplace performance and boosted Christmas sales.
In parallel the company stepped up its international activities in 2014. In July Spreadshirt entered the South-American market by acquiring the Brazilian platform Vitrinepix and new top-level domains were launched in Canada, Switzerland and Australia. In total in 2014, Spreadshirt sent products to over 150 countries, an increase of more than 250% compared to the 44 countries in 2013. 2014 also saw Spreadshirt keep its revenue stable and record a slight increase from 71.86 to 71.95 million euros (£57,932,620 (2013) to £57,996,303 (2014)). The biggest contribution (48 percent) is accounted for by the European core markets: Germany, Austria, Switzerland (DACH), France and the UK. 39 percent comes from North-America. 3.3 million products were sent around the globe and the most expensive t-shirts created in Europe cost 276 euros (£222) whilst in North America it was 179 euros (£144). Overall, the e-commerce platform paid 9 million euros in commission to its roughly 70,000 active sellers.
The main objectives of Spreadshirt in 2015 are to continue to simplify the use of the platform for sellers as well as enlarging its offering and target groups. This will happen in both B-to-B and B-to-C sectors. These include, for example; bands, YouTubers, TV-show fans, sports clubs and agencies where there is an opportunity for print-on-demand and global publishing services. A new TV campaign with the agency Jung von Matt/Spree is going to be broadcasted in core European markets, in order to raise further awareness for the company and boost the brand emotionally.