Majestic to relaunch website

Majestic is set to relaunch its website over the coming year, along with introducing a new app for consumers and revamping the remainder of its existing retail stores.

The refurbished Majestic store in York

Speaking to db following the release of its annual results last week, Majestic’s buying & merchandising director Richard Weaver said the new site, which is likely to launch in the next 12 months, will build on the work done by the retailer over the previous 18 months, which has benefitted from around £8 million of investment in infrastructure.

Weaver said much of the “heavy lifting” around IT and infrastructure facilitating customer fulfilment wasn’t necessarily “obvious” to investors and consumers, but that the retailer would see “the benefits of this over the coming financial year”.

“Those enable us to do things going forward, so we are expecting to roll out the revamped website this year, and a consumer app that are powered by our new internal IT capabilities,” he told db. However as yet there is little detail on the time-frame of the roll-out or the detail on the new site’s functionality.

The move comes off a boost to the company’s online operation which grew 56% overall in the last year, fuelled in part by its improved rate of sales and the new next-day delivery services that launched in October, as well as the growth of Naked Wines.

Weaver said the new national fulfilment centre now handled more than half of the retailer’s web sales, boosting availability and the online range, but the retailer had yet to see results from its first year in operation.

New look in-store

Majestic is also set to complete the roll out of new shelving in store this year, a process it has trialled in a number of sites, including its York store which was refurbished extensively after a flood last year, in order to cut time spent by store teams and refresh its merchandising.

“That part of the process has been very positive results – we’ve got some learnings that we will be taking that forward into our stores. Stores have already started to look different but we’ll be rolling that out to all stores this year,” he said.

Weaver said the scales of the refits, and other would depend on results of both rates of sales and efficiency in reducing staff tasks in its trial stores.

“We can isolate how we’re doing and back the winners – we’re being quite disciplined on that,” he said.

On Friday, the company announced it was ‘past the tipping point’ both financially and operationally as it reported double-digit sales growth of 15.8% to £465.4 million in the 53 weeks to 3 April 2017 – but profits continued to be hit by investment to bolster its operations, costs related to the Naked Wine acquisition, one-off costs and the revaluation of foreign exchange.