News roundup--Littlewoods, The Hut Group, more

Littlewoods.com has hailed the launch of its exclusive collection by designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen as the most successful unveiling of a home and living range in its 80-year history. The first week of sales of the LLB collection, which includes furniture, lighting, homewares and flooring, beat the online department store’s previous home and living record by 292 percent. Littlewoods largely attributes the success to the broadcast of its live and interactive TV show on Facebook and mobile on 13th June. More than 4,000 people streamed the one-hour show live, with 22 percent of those choosing to watch via their smartphones.

Yesterday, Littlewoods parent company Shop Direct announced the appointment of Alex Baldock as its new chief executive officer, succeeding Mark Newton-Jones.

Apparel, health and beauty and entertainment online retailer The Hut Group reported growth of 71 percent for the first three months of 2012.
The company, which operates Lookfantastic.com, Iwantoneofthose.com and Allsole.com, said its strategy of exiting its white-label operations and moving away from music and book categories in order to diversify into higher margin categories, helped revenues treble in the last two years. To further broaden its offering and reach a broader customer demographic, The Hut Group is launching MyVitamins.com later in 2012, to complement its sports-nutrition business MyProtein.com. Last month, The Hut renewed and extended its banking facilities with Barclays.

QVC UK has launched a free android app following the success of tis iPhone app, which now takes 5 percent of sales.

Reaction to the collapsed Farepak directors’ trial concludes Farepak could probably survived if its bank HBOS, had lent it an extra £3 million to £5 million. While HBOS had not acted illegally, the Guardian reports that high court judge Mr Justice Peter Smith questioned the bank executives' morals. A statement on the website of Unfairpak, a consumer group set up to fight for the rights of the out-of-pocket savers, ends with “HBOS, shame on you”.