Lombok eyes growth as sales start to revive

The retailer, famed for its South-east Asian-inspired furniture, is embarking on a three-year plan for the business, which started this year with the hiring of Martin Toogood, former boss of defunct furniture retailer Ilva, as chairman.

Lombok managing director William Landale said the three-year strategy will include investing in the online business, and is mulling opening more stores in the future.

“Nothing is ruled in or out at the moment,” he said. “But we’ll grow sensibly and methodically. We are in the fortunate position of being able to reset the dial.”

He said: “We’ve shifted gear between being financially not as stable as we should have been, into a growing business. Step by step Lombok is re-establishing itself, and a focus on some basic retail disciplines is starting to pay dividends. A lot of it is driven by Martin.”

He added that although Lombok had forecast “flat or even negative like-for-like sales” at this point, the retailer now believes it will “be in positive territory” this year.

Lombok was bought out of pre-pack administration in July by a consortium led by Privet Capital and Paradigm. 14 out of 19 stores were bought, saving around 120 out of 161 jobs.

“The macro-economic scene is clearly more favourable than 12 months ago, and we’re up against soft comparables,” said Landale. “When you go through the financial disruption we went through you focus on certain issues, there’s - quite rightly - an overskew on banking relationships and covenants but you really need to look at what you’re selling in what shops and that you have enough stock.”

He added that Lombok suffered as a combination of expanding the business “quite rapidly” and the onset of the recession proved a “toxic cocktail”.

With the hiring of Toogood, Landale said he wanted a “heavyweight” retailer on board and Toogood “has identified Lombok has good future prospects”.