Third-quarter sales for multititle mailer 1-800-Flowers.com were nearly flat, or up less than 1%, to $155.5 million, from $154.5 million last year. For the quarter ended March 28, the net loss from continuing operations was $5.9 million—an improvement on last year’s third-quarter net loss from continuing operations of $64.3 million.
“During the fiscal third quarter, our BloomNet wire service and Gourmet Food and Gift Baskets categories continued to perform well,” said 1-800-Flowers.com CEO Jim McCann in a statement. But he noted that the company’s consumer floral results were affected by weak Valentine-holiday results reflecting several factors, “including the Sunday day-placement, severe weather across much of the country and continued soft demand from consumers.”
McCann added: “This, combined with the increase in advertising, resulted in significant underperformance in terms of category contribution in our Consumer Floral category. As a result, we have made significant changes to our go forward marketing and merchandising plans for the Consumer Floral category and we are confident that we will see solid improvement in this category in our current fiscal fourth quarter and throughout fiscal 2011.”
McCann noted that the Company’s Bloomnet Wire Service and Gourmet Food and Gift Baskets categories grew during the fiscal third quarter. About 1.6 million e-commerce customers placed orders during the third quarter; around 60% were repeat customers of 1-800-Flowers.com.