Hamburg-based lingerie and swimwear retailer Lascana, an Otto Group subsidiary, has increased sales by 35% in the 2018/19 financial year, reaching 276 million euros, marking the fifth consecutive year the company has reached a double-digit increase in revenue. “We are very pleased to have increased sales by over 70 million euros in a difficult market environment and were able to significantly expand our already very substantial market share, especially with regard to swimwear,” says Jens Fehnders, founder and Managing Director of Lascana.
“The fact that even in Germany, we managed to attain a growth rate exceeding 20% was also due to last year’s ‘summer of the century’. We had the great strategic advantage of considering swimwear items to be all-year products, this is why we were almost the only German brand able to supply products in July and August. The increase in those two months was almost 100% compared to the previous year and most items were sold at non-discounted prices during that period. Those were the best two months we ever had in our company history,” Fehnders explains.
An extremely large share of sales was generated through new customers and, among other factors, based on the push effect of the big Lascana marketing campaign with Alessandra Ambrosio. “We are very happy about this positive trend, which resulted in several awards such as ‘Best Online Shop’ in the lingerie category (a customer satisfaction survey by Deutschland TEST) and ‘Best Online Retailer’ in the lingerie category (a survey by Handelsblatt),” says Stefan Meiners, Lascana’s E-commerce Manager. For Meiners, expanding personalised email marketing options will be at the top of the agenda in 2019, as well as providing relevant content, launching ads in search and display networks such as Youtube and Gmail. Lascana also pushes online shop sales by regularly sending out its own catalogues, with the ‘Woman’s World’ book issued in February generating an increase in weekly online sales exceeding 130%.
