Joules chief executive Nick Jones, who only took the reins of the fashion brand from long-term boss Colin Porter towards the end of 2019, said the profit warning over Christmas was due to an error on a spreadsheet pulled together ahead of its end-of-year sales event.

“When we are planning and preparing for an event, as we do for every event, we pull a lot of information from a lot of different places. Those then get pulled together and put on to spreadsheets. On one of those spreadsheets, there was an error.

“We collectively looked at that as a team and we made what we thought was the right decision, but in the end, we left ourselves with less stock than we thought we would have from a consumer point of view.”