BRA INVEST – BETTER BUSINESS
Living Story AB
Sales, stock and continuing rationalisation measures Living Story AB is a furnishing wholesaler located close to route E4 in Åstorp just northeast of Helsingborg. Its range of interior fixtures and fittings, furniture and outdoor garden ornaments is designed for both decorative and utility purposes, and is strongly linked to the trends and fashion prevailing on the market. Its customers are mainly interior design stores, garden centres, flower shops and furniture stores. We sell to retailers throughout the Nordic region. The watchword for 2013 was ”Stability”, with the objective of patiently building sound, fundamental stability in the business. The structural work has been completed and we have now established good system support, as well as a good order and storage structure. We have our delivery processes in order as we head into 2014! The financial year began with high expectations and we prepared organisationally for high sales volumes based on the past year’s sales plus some additional sales in the wake of the ”acquisition” of Alma Design. Early in the year, we saw that the sales were not there, so we took major cost-cutting and rationalisation measures immediately. These measures were then a fixture of the business the whole year, but the cost-cutting measures will not have their full effect until 2014.
CEO Christer Andersson 18 – ANNUAL REPORT 2013
In conjunction with the expected increase in sales, a large stock was built up at the beginning of the past year and it is a very heavy burden for us to handle. This overstock has been methodically sold during the year and has just about been cut in half. We opened an outlet store in the autumn that directly targets end customers to manage the items that are the hardest to move. Apart from our own premises, it has been necessary to store stock at external sites in the Åstorp area due to the overstock, which has been very costly. Unfortunately, we will need to continue doing this throughout 2014 before we reach a suitable stock level and logistics management. The necessary decision to essentially discontinue purchasing of new goods has resulted in us not entirely being able to maintain desirable delivery service and not
being able to renew and follow assortment trends either. Our stock situation complicates our sales efforts and vice versa. A negative spiral has occurred and all in all led to a very negative financial end result. This situation combined with the continuing rationalisation measures will be the big challenge to tackle in 2014. There is currently a well-communicated business plan for Living Story that clearly signals that we must turn around the negative economic trend we have had for several years in the 2014 financial year and that drastic measures may be taken if necessary.