About You, one of Europe’s fastest growing online fashion stores, recently announced a positive adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter of 2023/2024, reaching break-even earlier than expected. Defying continued volatile market conditions, About You made significant progress on improving profitability and driving efficiency while still increasing revenue, customers, and orders. For the remaining year, About You confirmed its full-year guidance, which foresees continued profitable growth.
About You was founded in 2014 and digitises the offline shopping stroll by creating an inspiring and personalised shopping experience on the smartphone. On the About You website and app, customers find versatile inspiration and over 600,000 items from around 3,800 brands. With more than 45 million unique active users per month, About You is one of the largest online fashion stores in Europe. It is active in all key markets in Continental Europe and in total provides worldwide shipping options to around 100 countries.
Through Scayle, About You also offers its proprietary e-commerce technology as a software-as-a-service product for brands and retailers to grow their international D2C businesses. Tarek Müller, the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of About You said: “In Q1 2023/2024, we managed to reach break-even ahead of plan in what continues to be a challenging market environment. Early strategic and operational measures allowed us to further optimise our inventory, logistics, marketing planning, and hiring. We are now seeing the benefits of these measures as they are starting to take effect and deliver tangible results. Along with the achieved revenue growth, we have laid the foundation for long-term profitable growth of our group in the last quarter.”
Driven by disciplined cost reductions in marketing and administration, the group achieved an adjusted EBITDA of €4.2 million (Q1 2022/2023: €-28.8 million) with a margin of 0.8% (Q1 2022/2023: -5.7%) in Q1. The increase in free cash flow to €10.8 million (Q1 2022/2023: €-24.4 million) was largely attributable to the improvement in EBITDA.
The group revenues in Q1 2022/2023 were at €504.1 million, and 39.6 million orders were placed by 12.8 million active customers in the last 12 months. In 2021, About You launched an IPO. Since then, the Hamburg-based e-commerce giant has kept on growing robustly, although rather in terms of revenue than in terms of stock price.
