The surface area of LPP stores exceeded one million square meters

The owners of LPP started 26 years ago as a small clothing wholesaler. Six years later, they decided to start their business as a clothing manufacturer, launching their first brand, Reserved. Not so long ago, back in 2012, the number of their stores was half the amount of those today. Their surface was nearly three times smaller then.

A decade ago, only two brands belonged to LPP – Reserved and Cropp, which still have the largest share in terms of the number of showrooms in LPP’s portfolio. At the end of the third quarter of 2017, there were as many as 827 shops with a total area of nearly 650,000 sq m. In 2008, the company took over two more brands – Mohito and House, increasing the area of its showrooms by more than 20%. Finally, in 2013, the clothing manufacturer decided to launch a new brand – Sinsay, which stores are now present in 11 countries already.

“We have been developing dynamically for years, but this year was very intense for us in terms of investment. We refurbished six salons, creating from scratch the new look of our brands. We expanded fourteen stores, relocated 22 stores and opened as many as 140 new ones. In 2017 alone, we have performed 278 operations in our showrooms in 20 countries” says Olimpia Patej, Investment Director at LPP.

The very intense period of the last 10 years led the company to where it is today. To a large extent, this is due to decisions made several years ago about the expansion to Western Europe. First in Germany, and this year in Great Britain, the company from Gdańsk has opened such large-scale Reserved salons as the one in Stuttgart (almost 4,000 sq m) or London (3,000 sq m).

The development tempo is dazzling. After the third quarter of 2017, LPP boasted an increase in space by another 6% as compared to the same period last year, and a nine-percent increase on a year-on-year basis is expected at the end of the year. Geographical coverage proves the scale – the company is present today in as many as 20 countries in Europe, Asia and Africa with almost 1700 stores. Their total area has exceeded 1 million square meters.

“Every day, in several cities simultaneously, groups of engineers, designers and dedicated specialists who are part of my team are intensively preparing new showrooms before the collections of our brands fill their shelves. This year we are especially proud of the opening of our flagship showroom in Great Britain, right in the centre of London – on Oxford Street. We have expanded the network of our stores also in Germany. The scale of our activity and the intensity of our work may be proved by the fact that in the last two weeks of 2017 we have opened another 21 stores with an area of over 16.5 thousand sq m. These are new showrooms mainly in Russia and Ukraine” comments Olimpia Patej.

LPP’s most recognizable brands are in Poland, although collections of the Polish clothing manufacturer are successfully sold on foreign markets – in the East, in Central Europe or in Western Europe. The creativity of Polish LPP designers is now known in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Belarus, Serbia, Russia, Ukraine, as well as in Germany and Great Britain. Reserved stores are present even in the Middle East, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. But this is not the end of the development of the store network owned by LPP. The company announced the further expansion of its brands in Poland and in the world some time ago already.

“In 2018, we expect a further increase in retail space by approx. 10% as compared to 2017. We want to continue the double-digit increase in sales of the LPP group. Over the next 12 months we plan intensive development of our brands, both in Poland and internationally. We will open approx. 50 new stores, also on new markets for us – in Kazakhstan, Israel and Slovenia. We will also strengthen the sales range of the Sinsay brand – the youngest in the company’s portfolio. We estimate that in 2018 the number of this brand’s showrooms will increase by as much as 25% as compared to 2017” says Przemysław Lutkiewicz, Vice President of the Management Board of LPP.

But this is not the end of the expansion. Today’s trade is also e-commerce. The company announces a further intensive growth in the number of online stores, which, as shown by 2017, have a huge impact on the success of the brands. In the last 12 months, the sales of LPP’s e-commerce brands have doubled. Online stores in 2016 were present in 6 European countries, while in 2017 this number doubled as well. In 2018, more on-line stores will be launched in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Ukraine.

“One million square meters is not the limit for our traditional sales network” explains Przemysław Lutkiewicz. “In 2018, we plan, inter alia, to support the development of a chain of stores in Poland, although here the saturation of the market with the stores of our brands is significant at the moment. We assume, however, that the increase in the surface area of domestic showrooms will be a one-digit one. In 2018, we will expand the network of showrooms in south-eastern Europe most intensively, where the increase in area may exceed even 20%. Of course, we also assume further development in Russia and Ukraine, where we expect intensive growth of e-commerce sales as well. Among other things, to this end, in 2017, we launched a distribution centre in Moscow, which is responsible for handling orders in the area of online sales in Eastern Europe. Our presence will also strengthen in the Middle East, where in the second half of the year we plan to launch our Reserved store in Israel in the franchise system” explains Przemysław Lutkiewicz.

In 2018, the area of the five store brands owned by LPP could even grow by another 100 thousand sq m. Such results provide the basis for concluding that LPP is undoubtedly one of the largest export goods of the Polish clothing market. And although hardly anyone knows about it, it is the most dynamically developing Polish clothing company in this part of Europe that sells a “modest” 140 million items of clothing every year in Poland and abroad.

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LPP SA is one of the most dynamically developing clothing companies in Central and Eastern Europe. For 26 years the company has been consistently and successfully operating on demanding clothing markets in Poland and abroad. LPP SA manages 5 fashion brands: Reserved, Cropp, House, Mohito and Sinsay. The company has a network of nearly 1700 retail stores as well as on-line stores of all its brands and it offers jobs for about 25 thousand people in offices and sales structures in Poland, European countries, Asia and Africa. LPP SA is listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange within the WIG20 index and belongs to the prestigious MSCI Poland index.