N Brown Group plc

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to NBRAN's interim results for the six months ended August 2022. I'm joined by Rachel Izard, our chief finance officer. Let's turn to the agenda for today. First, I'll give you an update on our highlights so far this year. Then I will hand over to Rachel, who will take you through the group's financial results. I will then return to talk in a little more detail about our KPIs and our strategic progress And after that, we'll open up for Q&A. The current macroeconomic climate led to a tough online retail market in the first half. Weighted for our category mix, the online market reduced by around 7% over the prior year. Customers are more cautious around discretionary spending as a result of inflationary pressures. Alongside this, we face the impact of inflation on our cost base. We have met the challenging conditions by taking action to mitigate these, and as a result, have continued to make progress across our business, balancing a credible trading performance while successfully continuing our strategic transformation. Although product revenue is down by around 5%, we've been disciplined in our trading approach. We haven't aggressively chased sales, and have seen average item values increase by 14%, which more than offset software website sessions and conversion. Demand has then reduced at a product revenue level post the normalization of returns rates. Last year was one of unusually low levels of consumer credit defaults as our customers transitioned through the pandemic. As a result, prior year profitability was boosted by the strength of financial services margin. The normalization of this has largely driven the lower EBITDA in the half. This is a business which is now in a stronger position than pre-pandemic as a result of all the work we've done over the last few years. Continue to have an incredibly strong balance sheet, a point which is sometimes overlooked. We have accessible liquidity in excess of 200 million. We're pleased that our new trading website for SimplyBee has launched to all customers in September. This is a key investment within our digital transformation, providing a mobile-first experience, reducing friction through the navigation and checkout. We'll now move forward with rolling this out to Giacomo in the first half of 2023. As a result of the impact of the macroeconomic climate on product revenue being expected to continue for the remainder of this year, We are planning for a decline in second half product revenue in line with the year-on-year trends seen in Q2 and September. We have therefore revised our guidance for the full year adjusted EBITDA to be in the region of 60 million. I'll now hand over to Rachel to talk you through the financial results.

Thanks, Steve. Let me start with giving you a summary of the group's financial performance in the half year. Overall group revenue was down circa 16 million, driven by a combination of both lower product revenue, reflecting the challenging online retail conditions, and lower financial services interest income, reflecting the smaller customer loan book from the start of the year, and the softer retail sales through the half-year period. Growth profit margin has stepped back 3.8 percentage points, materially driven by normalising of the FS margin rate post-COVID-19. Last year, we had exceptionally elevated FF margins as write-offs were atypically low, and we released the majority of the initial COVID-19 bad debt provision. Now, this has been partially offset by heartening growth in the retail growth margin. I'll talk to both these swings later. Our op-ex cost-to-sales ratio has remained below the pre-pandemic level of circa 40%. Versus half-year 2022, we saw an increase in the ratio of circa 3 percentage points. with a combination of lower operational leverage, where we held non-marketing costs broadly flat, and our active choice to invest in marketing in line with our strategy. Next, within the absolute spend, we've absorbed an impact of around two percentage points as a result of inflationary headwinds with contract management and volume flexibility. Now, combining the lower gross margin, materially driven by the FS normalization, with that active step-up in marketing investment, This led to the adjusted EBITDA of 28 million, circa 25 million lower than prior year. Below EBITDA, we saw a 4.2 million reduction in depreciation and amortization following last year's acceleration of amortization and the software as a service change. We successfully held interest costs flat, giving an adjusted profit before tax of 4.3 million, down circa 20 million on the prior year. Unsecured net cash was 5.3 million up on prior year at 47 million, and the balance sheet continues to be strong, and we have over 200 million of accessible liquidity. Finally, adjusted EPS was 72 pence, and that reflects the profit performance during the half. Looking at the EBITDA drivers, you'll clearly see from this slide that the majority of the EBITDA reduction has come from absolute reduction in FS growth profit. Now, this is partially due to the smaller loan book size coming into the year, but it's majority due to that normalizing post-COVID-19. with the prior year including atypically low levels of write-offs and the release of most of the initial COVID-19 IFRS 9 expected credit loss provision that we put aside at the start of the pandemic. Our absolute growth profit in retail was down only 2 million as we offset most of the market-driven volume impact through a disciplined approach to trading and margins, which I'm going to run through later. Across the cost base, you can see we control costs well. mitigating a lot of the inflationary impacts, which cost us circa 6 million and a half, and leaving the additional strategic investment in marketing that we talked about at year-end as the main net movement in the cost base. Looking at the revenue performance, I'll start with the context of the market and the weaker UK consumer confidence. Now, over the six-month period, the BRC's online non-food market tracker showed a 14% drop in demand, If we adjust that for our own product mix, which is more heavily into women's wear and less into white goods, that market dropped by about seven percentage points. In that context, our retail product revenue contracted 5.2%. And that was driven by a combination of lower strategic brand product revenue, reflecting that tough retail market, but with strategic improvements clearly flowing through. as well as managed decline in heritage brand product revenue, which was moderated to a lower rate of decline than in prior year, as we no longer have a drag from the closure of fig leaves. And then in the FS business, the interest income reduced 3.5% due to the smaller loan book coming into the year and the softer retail sales through the half, albeit the proportion of sales made on credit did increase during the period. Now, we've been disciplined with our approach to trading and retaining margins, and we took the decision not to aggressively drive volumes. I'll come up to the positive product margin rate later in the presentation, and Steve's going to pick up on the growth in average item values. Now, getting underneath the retail numbers. As we'd anticipated, we have seen a further increase in demand for clothing and footwear, particularly in relation to formal wear and occasion wear. Clothing and footwear reflected 70% of the mix in half one, an increase over the FY22 mix, and we're now almost back at the pre-pandemic level seen in FY20 of 71%. clothing and footwear remains the heartland of the business and where we see the most opportunity for future growth. With the mix back into fashion and customer behavior normalizing post-pandemic, we expected and have seen a further increase in returns rate. The step up is also driven at the detail level by customers buying into higher returning categories such as occasion wear dresses. And so overall, we're now running an average of about one percentage point below the pre-pandemic rate. The group's adjusted gross margin was 47.2% compared to 51% in half-1.22, and that swing is materially driven by the FS rate normalising post-COVID-19. Our product gross margin has improved, building on the gain shown at year-end, with the half-1 rate up 1.4 percentage points of LY, and there's a lot of work underneath the hood with that. Firstly, a pricing and mix benefit of circa 4 percentage points. from a combination of reducing promotional levels as we're trading in a disciplined manner and we haven't changed volumes. We've also increased prices in a measured data-led way in response to cost inflation. The mix has come back into clothing, which has a higher margin than home. And we've also added a small up list to delivery charges. Secondly, due to normalizing level of write-offs in financial services, we've claimed back a higher amount of associated VAT bad debt relief. And we credit that to the product gross margin as we can only reclaim that due to the benefit of being a combined retail and credit provider. This improved product gross margin by circa one percentage point. Thirdly, partially offsetting this, we've seen flow through of higher freight rates with a drag of around one and a half percentage points. Looking at FX, the hedging which we had in place has mitigated weaker sterling. And then finally, there was a further circa two percentage point adverse impact, which primarily relates to additional stock provisioning in light of the lower sales. And on the go forward, we're obviously carefully managing inventory intake. So that covers retail margin. I'll now move on to FS. The FS margin rate reflects a normalization post COVID-19. We outlined within our FY22 year end results, the elevated financial services margin rate, which was seen in that year. And now that we're normalizing into this current year, the year-on-year change in half one is seeing that flow through in two ways. First, a release of circa 10 million of the extra overlaid COVID-19 credit loss provision from year one of the pandemic, as it was no longer required. And actually, customer behavior was better than expected in year two of the pandemic versus year one. And that caused a one-off benefit of that provision release reported in margin last year. and a delta into this year's VLY of circa 8 percentage points. Secondly, last year in half one, we also saw lower than normal levels of write-offs as the customers have been supported through the pandemic with government schemes, and that resulted across all the consumer credit market in lower defaults and arrears actually than a pre-pandemic norm. This year has been more normal, so the VLY shows that impact of around 5 percentage points. To give you a sense of this in the actual customer data, we're showing you write-off rates. Normally, we see higher retail sales on credit in the peak period in the second half of our fiscal year, and then slightly higher write-off rates associated with that peak spending circa six months later in half one of the next year. Now, looking at the first three bars of the top graph showing half one performance, you can see how low half one last year was compared to the previous two years for normal write-off profiles. with customers being supported through the pandemic exhibiting higher repayment rates and lower write-offs. Looking at half one of this year, you can see how this is now normalized. In the bottom graph, for IFRS 9, we look ahead at future expected credit losses. Looking at the end of the half, we've got a provision rate of 13.9%. Now, the performance of the book in the half has been in line with the expected deterioration assumed at year end, and the macro indicators such as inflation and unemployment rates have moved as expected, So now the future economic uncertainty we included as a PMA post-model adjustment at the year end, that's now reflected in the core base provision and the PMA no longer needed. In addition, the accounts in payment arrangements have been discounted in the calculation to match our wide provisions. This amendment is consistent with year ends. So comparing the provision rate against the last two years, the underlying provision rate at half year is pretty consistent. This slide on adjusted operating cost ratio shows us continuing to hold our cost ratios below pre-COVID levels. On a one-year basis, we have seen an increase in the ratio. Some of this is operational gearing, though, with the lower revenue impacting the cost ratio for our fixed costs. We've also seen around 6 million of inflationary impacts against last year. However, in absolute terms, we've broadly been able to offset the inflation with contract management and volume savings, with the only material absolute increase in spend being the strategic investments in marketing. Looking at the individual areas, marketing and production includes that strategic decision to invest and is annualized against a low spend in quarter one of last year prior to that step up in strategic marketing. Now, we've seen about two million of inflation in this marketing area, particularly through higher costing paid in the market, paid social and paid media costs. The admin and payroll increase includes inflationary impacts totaling circa 2 million, and that includes both utilities and payroll. Finally, warehouse and fulfillment absolute costs are slightly lower, as with our high flexibility, we saved around 4 million due to lower volumes. That's then been offset with circa 2 million cost of servicing higher retainance terms as the returns rate is normalized, and about 2 million of additional costs from fuel surcharges and other inflationary costs on third-party contracts and resources. This slide shows how the EBITDA of 28 million has converted through to net cash outflow of circa 11 million, driven by in-year phasing at this halfway point in the year. Starting at the left on the top, we've seen an inflow of around 4 million, which includes benefits from non-cash and other working capital movements, partially offset by investment in inventory. The increase in inventory is around 16 million, and that includes both the increase in freight rates and input costs. And it also includes us intentionally moving our mix into newness. And we have proportionally more of our current season stock as new versus last and previous than in prior year. Customer loan book and securitization borrowings and financial services have resulted in the cash outflow in the half year. The net loan book size reduced somewhat, generating a net cash return to us. However, with the return to normal phasing with the payment arrangement building, This has reduced the eligible pool of loans that we can securitize on, so we naturally reduce the level of securitized debt as we build up this balance of payment arrangements to the bulk debt sale later in the year. Non-operational cash outflows of circa $22 million includes capital investment of $11 million, which is in line with last year, and it also includes some minor exceptional cash outflows, interest costs, and tax charges, which together are successfully slightly lower than last year. Across all these categories, we saw a net outflow of $10.5 million. We then adjusted the level voluntarily undrawn against the securitized debt by circa $15 million, and that's given us a net cash inflow of circa $4 million. I'll now walk us through what that practically means in terms of our robust cash and funding positions.

Three key points to highlight on these slides.

First, we have unsecured net cash of $47.2 million at the end of the half. We also have $45.5 million voluntarily underdrawn on the securitization facility, which is accessible. Combined, this reflects a figure of over $90 million. Now, that's around $10 million lower than at year end, but as I've just walked through, this is normal in-year phasing in the financial services cash flow. The corporate financing is in a strong net cash position. Second tranche of our funding is the financial services securitization facility. The drawn funding of $290.7 million is well covered by the customer debtor balances, with our growth debtor book being $572 million at the end of the half. Rolling the strong corporate net cash position together with the well-balanced FS securitization, we have net debt of $244 million, which represents the reduction over the year end. So in summary, our balance sheet remains strong. including the level of cash and accessible liquidity which is available to us.

In total, we have accessible liquidity in excess of £200 million.

Now, given the challenging macroeconomic environment, and in particular high interest rates and weak sterling, I thought it made sense to share a summary of our well-hedged risk management position for both dollar movements and interest rates. Now, we buy most of our retail stock in dollars, and for the current financial year, FY23, we are fully hedged at a rate of circa 136, compared to the more recent spot rates closer to 110. And for FY24, we have layered cover, and for the full year, that average is more than 50%. In terms of hedge accounting effectiveness, once we get to accounting for a period, above the line for stock, we normally have circa 80% of stock cost covered by hedges in gross margin from an accounting sense. And the remaining cash value of the hedges, as we're fully hedged for this year, is reflected through fair value adjustments to financial instruments below EBITDA, but still within PBT. At the end of August, we had a fair value asset of 16 million on the balance sheet relating to these dollar hedging instruments. And with regards to interest rates, in the prior year, we entered into an interest rate swap to a notional value of 250 million, fixing Sonia interest rates through to the end of December 24. This minimizes the interest rate variability through the income statement, and the fair value of this swap was 15 million at the half year. So in summary, our risk management approach is giving us a solid position on forward rates for both dollar and interest. Now, looking ahead and guidance for the remainder of our financial year. We've seen uncertainty around macroeconomic conditions persist, and visibility around future trading trends is obviously limited. Second quarter product revenue decline of 9.4% has continued into September. Hence, at this stage, we've amended our plans and are planning based on challenging market conditions continuing for longer, with half the product revenue expected to reduce at a similar rate to quarter two. Additional product margin improvements are expected though through the group's pricing response to cost inflation, the movement of the product mix back to clothing and our ongoing initiatives, including data usage to optimize pricing strategies. We'll also continue to carefully manage cost and margins whilst planning for ongoing elevated inflation and benefiting from the variable cost model. For half two, we'll also normalize now against a baseline that already included the step up in strategic marketing. Within financial services, we've yet to see a significant change in performance of the data book as a result of the macroeconomic environment. We do continue to expect the steady normalisation in arrears rates, though, to pre-COVID-19 FS levels. As a consequence of these factors, we now expect FY23 adjusted EBITDA to be in the region of £60 million. Finally, we continue to expect the group to maintain a strong unsecured net cash position. By year-end, we previously expected net debt to be in line with FY22's closing position. We now expect year-end net debt to have reduced below FY22.

So with that, I'll now hand you back to Steve to talk you through progress on our strategy.

Thank you, Rachel. I'll now talk about some of the strategic highlights from the half. We've made good progress across each of our strategic pillars. As a reminder, and as outlined at the time of our year-end results in May, we have simplified our strategy to make it more focused on the things that will have the biggest impact for our customers and support the growth ambitions of the business, deploying our money, time, and resource on the biggest priorities of the greatest value. These actions make Enbrown a simpler, more focused business, able to allocate colleagues, investment, and marketing spend in the most effective manner. Our focus is on growing the business through our three strategic brands, Simply B, JD Williams, and Giacomo, allowing for further simplicity rigour of execution, delivery of strong customer propositions and marketing efficiency. Home remains an important category and our focus has shifted to growing this through the multi-category platform of JD Williams, enabling marketing efficiency and cross-shopping. Our remaining brands are now established as a heritage portfolio. These include Home Essentials and Ambrose Wilson, and its focus is on stabilization and value protection rather than growth, with no further closures planned. We plan to fully integrate our flexible credit offer into the core of the customer value proposition. And we will elevate data as an asset at the core of our strategy, driving daily decision-making and activating our unique data pool. Picking up now on a number of areas of strategic progress we've made in the half by pillar. Within build a differentiated brand portfolio, we have continued to iterate our creatives to better represent the brand positioning. Simply Be, Giacomo and JD Williams have each seen evolved creative and media approaches in the period. Simply Be, the new creative is grounded in fit, which is the key reason our customers choose us. This was accompanied by a new media approach, which saw us move away from traditional TV advertising as we focused our efforts on channels which better reflect where our customer spends time, including digital video, social, out-of-home, and influencers. Simply Bee has recently been nominated for two Drapers Awards, including the best marketing campaign for our EffIt campaign. I'll talk about the other strategic brands in a moment on the following slide. Now moving on to elevating the fashion and FinTech proposition. I've spoken before about our good, better, best price architecture and creating product which represents great value and great quality, whilst introducing brands which stretch the range within our best category. We've made further progress in growing our in-house design products, building on previous work to develop our design team, whilst continuing to launch selected new third-party brands on our website, including Twisted Wonder, which was our biggest ever new brand launch on Simply Be. In financial services, our medium-term strategic priority remains to build a new, more flexible FF platform, which will enable us to launch new credit products to widen our appeal to customers, and work has started on building out the new platform. Alongside this, we've continued to focus on enhancing the existing proposition, including better integrating it into the customer journey and following the introduction of 0% interest offers to new customers, we now launch this to existing customers in Q3. Now on to transforming the customer experience. As I mentioned at the start, we have launched a new website for SimplyBee, completing the rollout to 100% of customers in September, and providing a mobile-first experience with reduced friction through the customer journey. On win with our target customer, we have focused on activity to revitalize our lapsed customer base, but also to drive frequency and engagement from our existing customers. We are also investing in our data in this area to better understand our base and how to improve customer targeting and personalization. With data being elevated from an enabler to a strategic pillar, We've made progress in laying the groundwork in our data transformation. Our data strategy, due to be released at the end of the year, covers the operating model, the analytics platform, the data culture required to establish data as an asset to win. The benefits span direct cost savings, operational efficiencies, and data-enabled use cases targeted at improving revenue and margins. We've already made significant progress towards our target operating models through our organizational design, ways of working, and corporate governance, and we have finalized key decisions relating to the analytics platform. Last year, we saw huge success with the build of our internal tool, PriceTagger, which helps us optimally promote products using price elasticity curves, and this has now been rolled out to our clothing promotions. And we've developed a mailing selections model to allow us to be more effective with our offline marketing spend by being more strategic in who we send paper to. Now we're moving on to a deep dive in some of these areas. Firstly, looking at how we're developing our brand portfolio. Done a huge amount of work over the past two years on clarifying our brands, looking at the brand role, the target customer, and the overall proposition. And this has already yielded some good results. We now focus our growth efforts on our three strategic brands, which are Simply Be, JD Williams, and Giacomo. Simply Be is an inclusive fashion brand for young women. It already has a strong emotional connection with customers who resonate with our size-inclusive messaging, and this is what gives us the right to win in this space. As I said on the previous slide, we've moved to a digital-first media approach, which is closely aligned to the customer base. JD Williams is a fashion and lifestyle platform for 45 plus women. A one-stop shop for fashion and home with a blend of own brand clothing and third party brands. Our ambition is to capitalize on this positioning and in the half we launched our collections creative approach to help customers understand the full range across categories. It was launched with a new media approach in spring summer 22 working alongside our brand ambassadors, Davina McCall and Amanda Holden, to bring it to life in an eye-catching, inspirational way. We've also launched JD Williams Pay as part of our core customer proposition. For Giacomo, we want to elevate its status in the UK as a menswear platform for all men, and our marketing approach has evolved to showcase the styles, brands and sizes relevant for every man, with this creative having been used for spring-summer. Our media approach also reflects the new creative through its communication and storytelling.

A huge amount of work has been put into improving our retail proposition over the past few years.

We've built a design team with excellent creative talent, which means we can truly create unique products for our customers that they can't get anywhere else. We'll continue to grow the mix of our own design product to build handwriting and uniqueness. The investment in our in-house design team has helped drive the proportion of unique product designed in-house from 67% in autumn-winter 2022 to 93% in spring-summer 2023. We've seen significant improvements in the rate of sale achieved on our new own brand clothing ranges in the half, including growth against last year of 31% on Simply B and 39% on J.D. Williams. This reflects the number of units sold over the length of time on sale. We are measuring how well products sell, which is a good indicator of the strength of our brand product performance. Continue to offer third-party brands to excite our target customers. We build on the strengths of existing partnerships, onboard new brands, and continue to build momentum in premium labels. Launches in the half include Susanda on JD Williams, and we've seen continued good performance on our premium brands on Giacomo, including Ralph Lauren and Boss. Flexible credit has been a core part of our offer for many years, and we know the connection between our retail and credit offer is the secret source of our business, enabling customers to buy what they want and manage how they pay for it in a way that suits them. These two elements are intrinsically linked as part of the experience of shopping with our brands. There is no separation between retail and credit. It's all the same customer and the same experience. Currently working on two areas in parallel in relation to our flexible credit products. Work has started on building our new tech platform, which will help us evolve our credit proposition with more products and a better digital first service for our customers. Alongside this, we're enhancing the offer on our existing platform and better integrating it into the customer journey. As a digital retailer, technology is key, and we know that to best serve our customers, we must deliver a fantastic experience. The new website, FrontEnd, and the FS platform are key strategic focuses for the business, and so we are pleased to have launched our new trading website on SimplyBeat, which went live to 100% of customers in September. This provides a mobile-first experience with easier navigation and reduced friction in the checkout.

Continue to provide a range of digital customer metrics to help track the progress of our business.

It's been a challenging trading period, and the impacts of this, as well as some of the mitigants, are reflected in the KPIs. As we move forward with strategic change, there's plenty of opportunity for further progress. Today, I'll talk you through five of the KPIs. First is the number of orders, which is 10% lower than the prior year. This is as a result of a combination of lower website sessions and conversion. And as we've said, the market has been challenging. And so there's a big element of consumer confidence playing out in these figures, as well as the impact of a significant increase in the cost of paid search and paid social in the market. This has reduced the paid sessions which we have achieved with that part of our marketing spend. Second, average item value rose by 14%. The impact on customer demand of the more subdued backdrop has been mitigated via promotional discipline, measured price increases, a focus on demand for occasion wear versus leisure wear, and customers trading up into our more premium ranges. Third is our active total customers. The number of customers who have been active with us in the last 12 months is flat to the half year but down on the year end. Against year end, we're seeing lower retrade rates, which we believe reflects greater caution from consumers. Fourthly, our arrears rates are at 1.6 points against the last half year and half a point against last year end, reflecting some normalization against the low rates of last year, which came as a result of an unusually high propensity of credit customers The pay down balance is in FY21 and into FY22, but still significantly lower than pre-pandemic. Finally, touching on MPS. We recognise it's down on last year as a result of some short-term impacts around delivery. MPS remains an important metric, and we are focusing on medium-term opportunities to improve the customer experience. At En Browne, we are fully committed to embedded sustainability throughout the organisation, our product ranges and our processes, and continue to progress with Sustain, our leading sustainability strategy. Developments in the period included the launch of Simply B's first clothing rental collection with the UK's leading accessible fashion rental platform, Higher Street. This is another important milestone in the Sustain strategy, with the rental edit helping to extend the lifespan of its products and encourage customers to embrace circularity. Responsible sourced product now makes up 31% of our own brand clothing and home textile ranges, as we target 100% by 2030 in line with our Textiles 2030 commitment. Other developments have included a particular focus on social impact areas, Our new charity partnerships with Retail Trust and Fair Share Greater Manchester were announced in September, and a more integrated diversity, equity and inclusion policy, EMBRACE, has been implemented. The first 12 months of EMBRACE are targeted on building engagement, awareness and connection, supported by five communities which we're establishing to represent core strands of diversity which exist within our business. Now, touching on some priorities across our strategic pillars as we look ahead for the rest of the year and beyond. Part of the process of developing our brand portfolio and building awareness of our strategic brands will launch a new influencer and social media strategy for Giacomo, as well as new creative platform for each of JD Williams and Giacomo. Building on the previous successful launches of third-party brands, we'll continue to add further selected brands to our offer, And in financial services, we'll continue to progress the building of our new platform to provide flexible credit. Now that our new website has been rolled out to Simply Be, we look ahead to launching this to Giacomo customers in the first half of 2023, so they can also benefit from an improved mobile-first user experience. We will also be upgrading the My Account area of the website, where customers can access account activity, such as orders and payments with updated technology. to drive an enhanced customer experience. And we will be working towards the launch of a new customer value model and the enhancements that this will bring to the deployment of guardrails around acquisition costs and targeting capability. We've seen significant success with the build of our internal tool price tagger, which helps us optimally promote product using pricing elasticity curves. And we'll be rolling this out across the home category.

We will also work on development of our new data platform.

Previously communicated, we have a medium term target of 7% product revenue growth and 13% EBITDA margin. We have a business which generates superior EBITDA margins given our integrated retail and financial services proposition. If the macroeconomic conditions improve, the board are confident in achieving these medium term targets which will deliver

significant returns for shareholders.

We entered the year with caution due to the high inflationary environment, but clear that we would have the confidence to invest in our revolved strategy. Although the environment has further weakened in the half, which has resulted in the revision of our full year expectations, nothing has changed in our approach to investing in our revolved strategy, and we do so backed by a strong balance sheet. Providing that the macroeconomic environment improves, we remain confident in achieving our medium-term targets. In an online market which declined year on year, we believe that we've made the right decisions around trading, driving some mitigation through average item values and retail margins, leading to only a relatively small decline in product gross profit and an increase in product gross profit margin. Meanwhile, we've tightly managed our cost base, which has been subject to strategic investments in marketing and inflationary impacts. We've normalized against exceptional financial services dynamics as our customers transition through the pandemic, and this is what has driven the lower year-on-year profit in the half. Looking ahead to our peak trading, we'll continue to sharply focus on trading through this challenging market whilst continuing to make progress with our strategy. We'll now turn to Q&A. So if you are not already dialed into the conference call, please do so now and we will take any questions in a moment. Thank you.

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, you may do so now by pressing start followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind and would like to be removed from the queue, please press start followed by two. We will just take a brief pause while we allow everyone time to ask a question.

Our first question today comes from Clive Black with Shaw Capital Markets.

Please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for the presentation. Very comprehensive. A couple of questions, if I may. Firstly, just on current trading, what does the exit rate in terms of the third quarter as it stands, has it been relatively steady as you saw q2 come into q3 or has it actually changed at all and in that respect um what sort of behaviors have you seen from shoppers uh over q2 and q3 today in terms of what they're um focusing on or upon and what they're not and then the second question is i guess more strategic in nature but it is pleasing to see that you've started work on your financial services platform um two elements of this i think from my mind is Firstly, what timeframe do you think that that is going to take? We understand it could be long-term, but what do you expect the business to gain from that, be it functionality for shoppers or financial return? Thank you.

Thank you for the questions, Clive. So I'll pick them up if that's okay. I think, first of all, in terms of current trading, Q2, we sort of highlighted the performance within Q2, and then we sort of moved into September. Well, with the sad passing of the Queen, the first or some weeks in September have obviously been a bit volatile in relation to trading. I know every retail business has sort of seen that. So it's a little bit difficult to sort of use that period as a proxy for what the possible trading looks like going forward. What I can say is that following on from getting through that period, then we are seeing similar patterns to Q2. So that, hence, we've sort of guided to a potential number that looks very much like Q2 for the remaining part of the year. Now, of course, this may improve. This may get a little bit worse. We don't know. As most retailers are sort of trying to sort of wrestle with. But fundamentally, all we can really do is sort of say that's where we are today. Hopefully, we'll see that improve a little bit. We're certainly taking a lot of actions to try and improve it. The team have got some very exciting plans on the build-up to Christmas, and I would hope that the guys can sort of cut through it a little bit. So that, in essence, is where we are. In relation to trends on product buying, we've seen similar trends actually all year. We've Our customers have effectively sort of shopped a little bit more into value on one hand, but actually more traded up on the other. So our best categories is where we're sort of seeing the growth. And in fact, our formal wear for men's and for formal wear for women's wear are both up quite significantly on this time last year, as are our sort of premium dresses. So one of the key things that we've pointed out is that our margin rate has improved. There's been quite a lot of pricing interventions driven by our data approach. But we're also very pleased to see our customers shop into a higher value category. And that is showing up in our average item value that we highlighted being up about 14%. So for me, I think we're going to see more of the same. But I'm hopeful that the team can excite customers through a very challenging retail market on the run up to Christmas. and hopeful that we can hopefully move that forward. In relation to the FS platform, that's a difficult question to answer. We have started to build. What I can share with you is that, in essence, we prioritized the retail side of the business first in relation to the building of the new front end, which is now live on Simply B. In terms of keeping the business focused on its key priorities rather than everybody getting excited on everything, I chose to sort of hold back in developing the financial services platform to make sure all the engineers were absolutely focused on execution of our retail stack first. Now that has gone live, we're feeling more confident in moving our key resources over to the financial services platform. We have started the build around four or five months ago. So we have made a start on that. So we're not starting from fresh at this stage. But we've got a long way to go, and I'm happy to share the progress as we go forward. At this stage, we're getting going. The board has signed off the investment. We've had an early initial team together, and they've started the build, and we're moving on from there. In terms of what we see in relation to the benefits of this, everything is interconnected in relation to our strategy transformation. As I'm sure, Clive, you know well, because you follow our story over the long term, we've evolved the business to be an e-commerce business. And we see a huge opportunity in relation to growing the business in the future through investment in our technology capability, our data capability, and effectively all parts of our five pillars of the strategy. Our new front end is really important because at the moment we're operating on old technology, which means that colleagues can't really make changes on a day to day basis. With the new technology they can, so that means we can start to operate on an enterprise operating model which puts the power in colleagues hands. We're empowering them to make more changes to the customer journey and improve the experience for our customers. delivering value and benefits in relation to natural search particularly. And with the financial services platform, the combination of those two things working together in the future will create a personalized experience for the customer. And importantly, colleagues will be able to make changes on a day-to-day basis to improve our performance. So all of this stuff hangs together, underpinned by a new data platform, which effectively is the intelligence that sits in the engine of those two platforms. And over the medium term, we expect to see our business moving from strength to strength as a result of that. So in short, the answer is I can tell you more in the future. I can guarantee that we're focusing on financial benefits as well as user experience. We see the two hand in hand. And the intelligence that we're creating in our data strategy will power both of those things forward. Hopefully that answers your question, Clive.

We have no further questions on the line, so I'll turn the call back to the management team.

Okay, thank you. I'd just like to thank everyone for joining us, listening to the presentation, listening to the progress the business is making, and we maintain our view, which is this is a challenging market, but we're managing wisely in the short term whilst investing for the medium term, and we remain confident that once the market returns, this business will achieve its medium-term targets. Thank you very much.

Thank you, everybody. We'll cut the call there.