Year: 2023

As Covid-19 rampaged across Europe in 2020, Primark’s managers could only watch as online rivals muscled in to supply T-shirts, hoodies and pajamas to its locked-down customers.

With no online sales channel, the discount clothing store was faced with total closure and burning through £100mn of cash per week.

The retail powerhouse that was forecast to make £1bn of operating profit in the year to September 2020 ended up making less than a third of that.

But even the toll of the pandemic has not persuaded Primark to finally embrace online shopping.

George Weston, chief executive of the chain’s owner, Associated British Foods, told the Financial Times that while it was “a nice hypothesis” that Covid had changed the industry for good, sending shoppers permanently online, the growth in Primark’s market share compared with before the pandemic suggested that was not correct.

Weston is adamant Primark “is and always has

Nynne, the fashion house created by Danish-born Nynne Kunde, is on a carefully plotted trajectory: a modern luxury brand focused on craftsmanship, and exaggerated silhouettes, that is ready to explore the American market in 2023.

Kunde graduated from the Istituto Marangoni in London in 2018 and a year later she was selling her eponymous label, initially into Japan through upscale retailer Ron Herman. The brand was picked up in Paris which, to date, is Nynne’s main sell-in location where it is showcased about four times a year.

In its early days, Nynne expanded through wholesale, keeping the online channel at arm’s length due to practical issues such as stock volumes, and the costs involved in returns, for example.

“Now that we are expanding we have pre-orders online, as well