NORTHWICH’S largest employer The Hut Group took home the prestigious International Growth Retailer of the Year Award at the Retail Week Awards 2017.

The Gadbrook Park-based business has a portfolio comprising more than 100 websites over 25 health and beauty, wellness, fashion and lifestyle brands.

The scale of the online health and beauty group’s ambition – to drive international revenues by investing time and resources in a fully in-house model, creating a scalable international technology platform – won the judges’ admiration.

One judge at the awards said: “International has become a massive proportion of The Hut Group’s business in no time at all. It is still growing and I think it has a lot more scale. It has been very neat tapping into the protein market and becoming the world’s biggest player with a deep-rooted knowledge of that category.”

“With strong competition in this category, the judges praised The Hut Group’s submission for demonstrating strong results and a compelling proposition with real long-term growth potential.”

International revenue accounted for more than 50 per cent of the total for the first time in the last reported full year. The centralised international roll-out programme has seen international retail visits rising by 36 per cent last year to 115 million.

This investment has supported the group’s ambition to rapidly roll out international sites – 60 were launched during 2016, compared with 22 in 2015.

It added Skinstore, a cosmetics site, and Idealshape, a weight management brand for women, in June and September 2016 respectively.