Stronger start to Christmas season helps ProCook make up lost ground

Published by

Peter Davison

Matt Tebbutt

The new boss of Gloucestershire-based kitchenware brand ProCook has told investors that a strong start to the Christmas season had helped the firm recover ground lost earlier in the first half of the 2024 financial year.

Lee Tappenden, who joined the company in October, said challenges around Google rankings for the firm's new website - which went live in September - had got the period off to a shaky start.

ProCook sales continue to fall amid ‘difficult’ trading conditions

This played some part in revenue declining 3.8 per cent to £26.3 million in the six months to October 15, he said.

However, pre-tax losses narrowed slightly to £3.2 million, and revenue over the first eight weeks of this half increased 1.5 per cent.

In the first eight weeks of the second half retail stores had 4.1 per cent year on year like for like growth.

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He said there had been high demand for Black Friday deals, and that anew brand campaign featuring TV chef Matt Tebbutt had been launched.

“Whilst we remain cautious about the timing and pace of market recovery, we are confident in our proposition and are making good strategic progress in building a stronger customer-focused business ready to accelerate growth as trading conditions improve and deliver profitable and sustainable growth for all stakeholders,” he told investors.

Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country. An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts. Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.