Home shopping group recruits 22,000 customers to Gardening Direct in three months.
Jersey-based Flying Brands reported a 30% increase in sales for its core online and mail order Gardening Direct business for the three months to October 2, 2009.

The rise to £2.31m, explained the company, was partly attributable to "timing differences in the dispatch of products". However, the board said that it still expects Gardening Direct's like-for-like sales increase for the autumn season as a whole to be in excess of 15%.

The home shopping group also increased its autumn advertising and recruited an additional 22,000 customers to Gardening Direct during the three-month period, taking the total number for 2009 to date to 74,000, compared with 46,000 in 2008.

Its Garden Bird Supplies business reported sales of £0.80m - slightly down on 2008 figures. Total sales for Flying Brands' garden division were up 13% to £3.11m compared with 13% for the same period last year.

Revenue for the Flying Brands group as a whole, which includes Flying Flowers and Greetings Direct, was down 2% to £5.81m, compared with £7.53m in 2008.

Chief executive Stephen Cook said of the results: "We are encouraged by the continued growth in sales and customers numbers in our core Gardening Direct business and we will go into 2010 with significantly more gardening customers than we had at the beginning of the current year.

At the interim results we said that our second half performance was reliant on a small number of key campaigns which were difficult to predict so we are pleased that the Gardening Direct Autumn campaign performed inline with our expectations."

Last week the group announced a placing of 2,344,582 new securities on the market, which raised £1.76m. Flying Brands said that the funds are to be used to repay part of the group's outstanding debt, which stood at £3.81m at October 2. The new units will rank equal with existing units issued in the company.