Boozt AB Annual and Sustainability Report for 2021
Boozt AB publishes the full-year report for the financial year of 2021 (January 1, 2021 - December 31, 2021), which includes the Corporate Governance Report and Sustainability Report.
Letter from the CEO
The Nordic Department Store
When we launched Boozt.com back in August 2011 our vision was to build a Nordic online department store. Back then people said that it wasn’t a grand world-changing-vision and that we should be careful to speak about it since department stores were going out of fashion.
Nevertheless, we believed in this vision. We believed that by adding one brand at a time and one category at a time, inch by inch we would be able to create the Nordic department store; a modern online version of the classic department store. Curated as before, but not limited by physical constraints, locations or geographies.
Over the years, in line with our ambition, we launched our categories Kids, Sport, Beauty and Home alongside Women’s and Men’s fashion. Apart from providing an outstanding shopping experience from this curated multi-category approach, we have learned that it is a good hedge towards changes in consumer behaviour. Occasion-wear has been a good example where both women and men have been buying less occasion-wear during the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. That would have been a greater challenge if we were only selling Women’s and Men’s fashion, but, since we have been able to sell more Kids, Sport, Beauty and Home, the impact hasn’t been as big.
Our categories are the reason we have accelerated our growth over the past two years and why we have higher profitability than most, if not all, of our peers. In 2021, we achieved net revenue growth of 33.4% with an acceleration in the fourth quarter with 38.1% growth. Growth was strong across our universe but most notably in our adjacent categories. This benefits our average order value as there is a general trend of customers adding multiple items per basket. The high average order value is one of the most important pillars of our business model and something we will protect and develop without compromise.
Customers have really started to buy into the concept of the Nordic department store, which our numbers reflect. We have managed to grow our active customer base with more than 500,000 customers and more importantly, we have succeeded in keeping our new and existing customers happy with the service and selection. This has resulted in an all-time high Net Promoter Score of 79 at the end of 2021 along with a stable 5-star rating on Trustpilot.
We have not achieved our goals yet, but we believe that we have laid the foundation. I am confident that we at this time have the relevant categories that are quickly becoming destinations in their own rights, and we can now focus on making these categories even stronger. We believe that this curated multi-category department store strategy will set us apart from our peers and provide us with a unique potential for value creation.
Responsible e-commerce
We have also taken important steps in contributing to a more sustainable industry. We are fully aware that fashion and apparel has a considerable carbon footprint, but we are committed to reducing that footprint. We have launched our Care-For strategy, providing a roadmap for how to become the leading responsible e-commerce company in the Nordics by 2025. We are on a journey to become a B-Corp certified e-retailer and even though e-commerce in general, and Boozt in particular, probably is the most CO2 friendly way of buying fashion and apparel, we are constantly trying to reduce the carbon footprint of our deliveries and returns.
We were front runners in reducing returns with the introduction of our Fair Use policy at the end of 2019, where we so far have blocked approx. 25,000 customers. By enforcing this policy, we saved 900,000 “unnecessary” packages being shipped in 2021 – of which 430,000 would have been returns. This is equal to 300 truckloads saved.
During 2021 we also launched ReBoozt, our peer-to-peer platform for pre-owned items. We want to keep giving our customers a better shopping experience and with the high-quality products sold on Boozt, we think it is natural to provide a seamless option to increase the circularity and lifetime of these products and reduce the footprint. Promoting more sustainable consumption by use of the Boozt technology platform ultimately makes sustainable choices more convenient.
Inch by Inch
Having three children, I see it as my parental duty to introduce them to movie classics that will provide them with life wisdom. The other day, when watching Any Given Day with my youngest, I was reminded of the movie’s famous “Inch by Inch”-speech made by Al Pacino when trying to convince his players that only by thinking and acting as a team, they will be able to win the match. He talks about how life is a game of inches, just like football. The team fights for that inch, they tear themselves and everyone around them for that inch, and when they add up all those inches it makes the difference between winning and losing.
When I watched this scene, I thought about our Boozt team. A team that during the last 24 months of the COVID-19 pandemic has been fighting for these inches. A team that has delivered outstanding results to all our stakeholders in an environment that has been more challenging than ever before. Fighting to deliver an outstanding customer experience, and to contribute to a better world with our environmental and social actions (even though we are nowhere near being perfect). We have fought with and for our team members and we have been fighting to provide a good return on investment to our shareholders.
I am proud of our team. I am proud to say that we, fortunately, are very different as individuals, coming from 38 different countries, with different cultural backgrounds, different religious beliefs - and non-beliefs, different political views, and different colour of our skins. Together we make an amazing team. We share our core values and beliefs of Trust, Freedom and Responsibility and even though we have outstanding individuals, we are pretty good at working as a team. This is what makes all the difference and why we win most of our matches.
I will do whatever I can to keep this team together. Make sure that we continue to fight for those inches. Because I and the team know that there is always a new match to be played tomorrow.
Best
Hermann Haraldsson, Co-founder and Group CEO
The full Annual Report including the Corporate Governance Report and the Sustainability Report for 2021 is available here.
