Brookstone

Brookstone Inc. (Merrimack, N.H.) has reported record profits and a 14.9 percent sales increase for its 2004 fiscal year ended Jan. 29, 2005.

Same-store sales rose 6.3 percent for the year.

For its fourth quarter, the specialty products retailer reported an 8.5 percent sales gain. Same-store sales were flat.

Brookstone chairman, president and ceo Michael Anthony said he credited the company’s record performance in 2004 to customer demand for proprietary Brookstone-branded products, as well as strong revenue growth among all the company’s sales channels. “We are pleased with our 2004 results, particularly with our record profit and our operating income as a percent of sales, which was the highest in our company’s history, even after the impact of substantial structural increases in costs such as Sarbanes-Oxley,” Anthony said. “We are also pleased that these results follow last year’s strong financial performance.

“In 2004, we continued to see the benefits of our investment in our product-development infrastructure, as customer demand for products designed and engineered by Brookstone rose from 65 percent to 70 percent of sales,” he continued. “These products typically have a higher net margin than other products. We are also pleased that we were able to raise our product margins in 2004 over our strong performance in 2003.”

Anthony reported that the retailer’s Gardeners Eden concept delivered its second consecutive year of double-digit same-store sales increases. “In 2004,” he said, “we opened two new stores for a total of five locations in various real-estate venues. Only when these stores achieve our return criteria, however will we consider a further rollout of the Gardeners Eden stores.”