Thursday, Jan 28, 2010    Text size: 

HILLSBOROUGH, North Carolina — Adam & Eve today announced a 17% profit increase in 2009 over 2008’s figures.

Areas of growth in 2009 included e-mail marketing, paid search marketing and marketing for AdamAndEve.com that is placed offline in radio, TV, podcasts and other areas. These areas had double-digit growth for the second consecutive year.

Adam & Eve’s website AdamAndEve.com/news and mail order catalog bucked the retail trend by increasing profits in a year when many companies were relieved to break even, the company said.

"Through smarter marketing efforts, by taking advantage of growing marketing channels and by increasing operational efficiencies, we improved our profit by 17% over 2008,” said Adam & Eve Marketing Director Chad Davis.

“Definitely, 2009 was a challenging year. We experienced a slight decline in sales as the paper side of the business shrank more quickly than we anticipated. Offsetting that shrinkage were both an increase in the efficiency of our marketing dollars and sales growth in other areas. Fortunately, December sales were up over 2008 and profits for the month and year were very healthy,” Davis said.

Davis added that similar to the shift of business from traditional catalog to internet-based is the shift in product preference of the customer. Personal massagers (vibrators) continue to make up a larger portion of web sales. Personal massager (vibrators) sales hit another high in 2009 and accounted for 1/3 the overall revenue.

“We attribute some of this shift to the customer base ordering from our website. Typically, more women order online than through our traditional catalog,” he said.