Gifting retailer’s Q3 revenues slip

While sales across floral divisions were strong, a late Easter impacted 1-800-Flowers.com’s third quarter revenues.



For the quarter ended April 2, 2017, revenues were $233.7 million, a slight dip compared to $234.2 million in the prior year period. This reflects lower year-over-year profits across the Gourmet Food and Gift Baskets divisions due to the Easter holiday shifting into the company’s fiscal fourth quarter this year.



However, this impact was largely offset by strong revenue growth in the company’s consumer floral and BloomNet segments, which grew 10.2% and 7.0%, respectively, compared with the prior year period.



While revenues missed analyst estimates of $236.5 million, the company posted EPS of ($0.17), $0.01 better than analysts’ predicted ($0.18).



Gross profit margin for the quarter was 40%, a decrease of 130 basis points compared with 41.3% in the prior year period. This primarily reflects lower gross margin in the company’s Gourmet Food and Gift Baskets segments, again, due largely to the shift of the Easter holiday.



Net loss was $11.1 million, compared with a net loss of $9.1 million in the same period last year.



“In our floral businesses, we more than offset the impact of the Easter shift by continuing to drive strong growth in our everyday gifting business and maximizing the benefit of the weekday placement for the Valentine holiday,” said Chris McCann, CEO, 1-800-Flowers.com. “However, the later Easter date this year moved significant revenues out of the third quarter in our gourmet food and gift baskets segment. Combined with the timing of some Harry & David revenues, this impacted both top and bottom line results for the quarter.”



1-800-Flowers.com continued to acquire new customers for the quarter — 881,000 new customers, to be exact. Approximately 1.9 million customers placed orders during the quarter, of which 53.4% were repeat customers.