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Download the full Annual Report 2020/2113.8MB
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Annual Report 2020/21

Chairman’s Letter

“We will continue to be guided by the same commitment to doing well by doing right by all our stakeholders.”

gerry murphy

Chairman

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“We have transformed our business and built a new Burberry, anchored firmly in luxury.”

MARCO GOBBETTI

Chief Executive Officer

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CEO’s letter

Our Purpose

Creativity Opens Spaces

Creativity Opens Spaces

At Burberry, we believe creativity opens spaces. Our purpose is to unlock the power of imagination to push boundaries and open new possibilities for our people, our customers and our communities.


This is the core belief that has guided Burberry since it was founded in 1856 and is central to how we operate as a company today.

CREATIVELY DRIVEN

  • Finding beauty in every detail
  • Putting passion and creativity in everything we do
  • Committed to excellence
  • Challenging the ordinary to pursue the extraordinary

A PROUD HERITAGE

  • Inspired by our past, as we create our future
  • Globally minded, learning from others
  • Championing contrasts from royals to rebels
  • Representing Britain on the global stage

FORWARD THINKING

  • An open space for imagination
  • Free to explore, push boundaries, pioneer
  • Unafraid to stand out
  • Our creativity drives us forward

OPEN AND CARING

  • Harnessing strength in diversity
  • United to achieve common goals
  • Responsible, guided by our conscience
  • Upholding a legacy of respect and inclusivity

Financial highlights

Alternative performance measures, including adjusting measures, are defined on page 53 of the Annual Report. Pro forma FY 2019/20 results are included to better indicate the impact of adoption of IFRS 16 Leases in FY 2019/20. These pro forma results are estimations of the results for FY 2019/20 if the previous accounting standard for leases, IAS 17 Leases, had been applied.

* The Group also had borrowings at March 2021 of £297m (March 2020: £300m)

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STRATEGY

In the last three years, we have transformed our business and built a new Burberry, anchored firmly in luxury. We have revitalised our brand image, renewed our product offer and elevated our customer experience, while making further progress on our ambitious social and environmental agenda. In spite of COVID-19, we completed our objectives for the period and delivered a strong set of results in FY 2020/21.

 

Our Journey

FY 2017/18 – FY 2019/20 Building the foundation

  • Reposition to luxury
  • Establish new product offer
  • Reset distribution
  • Maintain stable revenue and profit

FY 2019/20 – FY 2020/21 Strengthen foundation

  • Further progress and resilient performance despite COVID-19 pandemic
  • Improved full-price sales
  • Average Unit Retail (AUR) increase
  • Growth in leather goods and outerwear

FY 2021/22 AND BEYOND Growth acceleration

  • Accelerate revenue growth
  • Expand margins
  • Deliver positive change

STRATEGY OUTLOOK

Having successfully executed Burberry’s transformation and established a strong foundation, in this next chapter, we will leverage our unique brand to deliver sustainable, high-quality growth, while continuing to be a force for good in the world.

1. COMMUNICATIONS

Now more than ever, consumers, particularly younger ones, are seeking emotional connections with brands.

Our ambition is to excite and inspire the Fashion Vanguard, fostering a strong Burberry community.

We will strengthen the emotional connection with purposeful, authentic luxury storytelling, while leveraging our strong network of communities and influencers to amplify our brand. Above all, we will maintain a firm focus on our purpose in order to differentiate Burberry from its peers.

2. PRODUCT

Our vision is to leverage the strong luxury offer we have built over the past few years, maintaining focus and innovation around our anchors of outerwear and leather goods. Within leather goods, having transformed our women’s architecture, we will continue to deliver newness and relevance while establishing key shapes within the men’s offer. In outerwear, we will build desire through fabric innovation as well as elevation of product.

We will further elevate our ready-to-wear collections by developing a strong position in everyday luxury pieces.

Additionally, we will increase our focus on shoes, which is a strong category for customer recruitment.

3. DIRECT TO CONSUMER

In the last three years we have elevated our store network so that it is aligned to our luxury positioning. In this phase we will continue to transform our direct-toconsumer channels to create a luxury truly omnichannel experience that will both attract customers to the brand and ensure their ongoing engagement with us. In the next phase we will focus on five key actions:

  1. Rolling out our new store concept
  2. Focusing on local customers
  3. Accelerating store performance
  4. Taking a lead in omnichannel, building on our pioneering Social Retail concept
  5. Supercharge digital sales

ENABLERS

  • Agile supply chain
  • World-class talent
  • Secure, integrated and consumer-led technology
  • Operational efficiency

case studies

OPENING NEW SPACES: SOCIAL RETAIL IN SHENZHEN, CHINA

OPENING NEW SPACES: SOCIAL RETAIL IN SHENZHEN, CHINA

WeChat mini-programme

The dedicated WeChat mini-programme acts as a bespoke digital companion, encouraging visitors to interact with the space and share their experiences online. The more a customer engages with the physical space through the mini-programme, the richer their experience becomes.

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Thomas’s Cafe

Named after Thomas Burberry, Thomas’s Cafe is a dedicated space for the Burberry community. The interior of the café takes inspiration from the creative codes introduced by Riccardo Tisci, including high-gloss tones of beige, layered curtains and chamfered mirroring. Animals are also referenced throughout and can be seen in prints on the wall, as well as in the bespoke tableware. The café menu celebrates English and Chinese tea culture with playful and modern fusion elements. The menu also evolves as customers engage with the WeChat mini-programme and their social currency advances, unlocking new items. Designed as a dynamic space, it can be repurposed into a community space for activities, including talks, workshops, exhibitions and live performances.

Social currency

Within the mini-programme, customers can earn rewards through the Burberry social currency feature, unlocking exclusive content and personalised experiences. Each customer is given a playful animal character that evolves as they engage in store and online, with new characters and outfits to discover. Some examples of these characters can be seen above.

Rewards range from exclusive café menu items at Thomas’s Cafe to mini-programme content.

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Immersive experience

The store, which is fronted by an interactive digital window, comprises 10 rooms decorated in hues of beige, pistachio, pink and blue. Within these, there are areas that celebrate the Burberry house codes, including the Trench Coat, the Thomas Burberry Monogram, Nature and the Burberry Animal Kingdom.

The Trench Experience is an exclusive space, which customers can unlock as they build their social currency. An homage to Thomas Burberry’s vision, the room is a digitally immersive journey through nature, bringing Burberry’s heritage of exploration to life and creating unique and personal content for the customer to share on social media.

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A VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE

A VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE

Digital runway shows

Our ambition is to inspire and excite highly influential luxury consumers, fostering a strong Burberry community. When the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to host runway shows in person, we harnessed our creativity to reinvent this key inspiration moment. We pushed boundaries to create online experiences that gave front row seats to the Burberry community around the world.

Spring/Summer 2021 womenswear show

For our Spring Summer 2021 collection, In Bloom, we teamed up with influential livestreaming platforms to broadcast the show online and reach a wide audience.

Digital runway shows

We invited internationally acclaimed artist Anne Imhof to collaborate on the show experience, creating a unique event set in a forest that played with rules and rebellion. The collection’s inspiration was a modern mythology, a contemporary fairy tale in the deep ocean, a love story blooming between a mermaid and a shark, darkly romantic and unexpected. Like waves crashing uncontrolled against the shore, the performance featured bodies, ebbing and flowing, models and performers as one. Artist and musician Eliza Douglas provided a unique real-time soundtrack, further exploring the boundaries between art, fashion and live performance.

Spring/Summer 2021 womenswear show
A VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE

In China, the show was featured on Tmall as part of Alibaba’s Super Brand Day. In advance of the event, our branded activity on Tmall included a livestream with a brand ambassador and broadcasting video collaborations with dancers from the hit show “Street Dance of China”. In the three days before the show, our on-site activity gained over 20 million comments, likes and shares. On the day, the show was watched live by 28 million viewers on the platform, while Burberry’s Tmall store saw a record high in daily transaction volume.

In the rest of the world, we became the first luxury brand to partner with the livestreaming platform Twitch. Erykah Badu, Rosalía, Steve Lacy and Bella Hadid started the event with a pre-show conversation. During the show, we used Twitch’s Squad Stream function to enable our virtual guests to view the collection from multiple perspectives and share their impressions via the chat function in real time.

Autumn/Winter 2021 menswear presentation

Autumn/Winter 2021 menswear presentation

For our Autumn/Winter 2021 collection, Escapes, we streamed the presentation from our Regent Street store.

Riccardo Tisci’s first Burberry collection focused on menswear, the presentation celebrated the relationship between humanity and nature, and referenced Burberry’s heritage of exploration.

The store was reconfigured as a meandering terrain. Models followed different paths, reflecting the myriad of directions creativity and exploration can take.

Video camera operators offered alternative perspectives on each of the looks, from detailed closeups to wide-angle views. We shared the presentation online and afterwards posted images of the collection on Burberry.com. In doing so, we replicated the sense of intimacy that a presentation creates for a wide audience and built a sense of community among viewers who could share their reactions to looks via chat functions.

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A VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE
Thomas Burberry

“In this revolutionary age, few people can afford to be careless about their clothes.”

Thomas Burberry (1835-1926)

ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL AND GOVERNANCE

Our commitment to ESG-related matters is the purest expression of our purpose and values. We are committed to building not only a financially stronger Burberry but also a better company that is a force for good in the world.
 

ESG framework

People

Fostering creativity

Communities

Empowering youth

Environment

Building a sustainable future

ESG

Environment, Social and Governance

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  • People

    COVID-19

    Ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our colleagues and customers is fundamental to how we do business at Burberry.

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    People

    The safety and wellbeing of our people remained our highest priority in 2020/21.

    We closed sites where we were required to under lockdowns, most notably across the EMEIA region. Where our sites could stay open, we were scrupulous about putting in place robust measures and ensuring they were adhered to so work could be conducted in a safe and secure environment. In line with government and health authority guidelines, these included staggered start and break times to manage social distancing, as well as temperature checks and installing additional sanitising stations.
    People
  • Customers

    COVID-19

    Ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our colleagues and customers is fundamental to how we do business at Burberry.

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    Customers

    As the COVID-19 crisis unfolded across the world, it was clear that mutual support and innovative thinking would be the cornerstones of our response, both as a business and a member of the broader global community. We leveraged our digital capabilities to stay connected with our customers by bringing innovative shopping experiences to them virtually. Our event formats evolved over the financial year to include customer participation in virtual product launches and styling sessions. We redesigned Burberry.com so customers can now explore individual products as well as styled looks. We introduced a new chat function so that our online retail teams can help with styling, sizing and recommendations. This helped our teams to stay connected with their clients and continue to provide the very best customer service.

    Where our stores were able to remain open we quickly implemented safety measures, including social distancing, sanitising stations and appointment bookings, in line with local government and health authority guidelines.
    Customers
  • Communities

    COVID-19

    Ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our colleagues and customers is fundamental to how we do business at Burberry.

    Read more

    Communities

    Inspired by Thomas Burberry, we contributed to the relief efforts. Early in the year, we retooled our factory in Castleford, Yorkshire to manufacture non-surgical gowns and we sourced surgical masks through our global supply chain. This amounted to more than 160,000 pieces of PPE that we donated to the UK government and healthcare charities. We are grateful to the many colleagues who volunteered to support this initiative during the national lockdowns in the UK.

    In addition, we manufactured a further four million masks and 50,000 gowns at cost for the UK National Health Service.

    We contributed to the COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution through early donations to the University of Oxford’s emergency vaccine research and UNICEF’s COVID-19 Vaccines Appeal.
    Communities
  • The Burberry Foundation

    COVID-19

    Ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our colleagues and customers is fundamental to how we do business at Burberry.

    Read more

    The Burberry Foundation

    The Burberry Foundation (UK registered charity number 1154448) launched an emergency relief appeal in April 2020 to help those working on the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic and support communities in need around the world. We launched branded face masks in August 2020, donating the proceeds directly to the Burberry Foundation COVID-19 Community Fund. All monies raised by the fund were directed to support relief efforts globally, from procuring and distributing surgical masks, gowns and other protective equipment to providing funding to food banks and healthcare charities.
    The Burberry Foundation

USEFUL LINKS

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