Q&A: Oliver Bonas' founder and managing director Oliver Tress

How did you trade this Christmas?

You’ve always got one eye on like-for-likes. We had a 6% jump in like-for-likes in the period and sales for December surged 37%. It feels pretty good up there.

How did your fashion offer perform?

It was a warm October so it wasn’t the best autumn/winter we’ve had. Clothing in December is pretty small for us because that’s when we do all our gifting.

More Oliver Bonas stores are appearing, are you accelerating openings?

We opened eight or nine stores last year and had one or two relocations. We opened in Edinburgh and Glasgow as we move more out of London. We’re now looking at opening in places such as Oxford and Brighton.

The last set of results stated Oliver Bonas was eyeing overseas stores - how are plans progressing?

We’re having open conversations with people about going overseas. There are so many different routes, so we will wait and see.

We haven’t got masses of stores in the UK so we’re very focused on that. We have 41 stores in the UK.

We have talked about having 80 to 90 shops in the UK and we may open 10 this year. But we find that estimates get revised as we
go along.

I would be surprised if we opened overseas this year. I think 2015 is the year.

What changes are you making online?

Online is definitely our big thing. We’ve still got a long way to go. Online takes up 7% of our total sales. We want to raise our game and keep it accelerating.

There are certain elements of functionality we need to sort out. I think the whole gifting element needs to improve to offer a broader product.

Furniture is doing very well online. That will be a growth area for us as it is 40% of our total online sales. By the end of the year we want a run-rate of double the sales of where it is now.