Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (NYSE:ANF) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Corey Tarlowe from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Corey Tarlowe: All right. Good morning, and congrats on the progress here. And thanks for taking my questions. So Fran, maybe if you could just start talking a little bit about how you feel about the health of the inventory going into the holiday. It sounds like a lot of the inventory is current, and they’re all the stores, and they seem to look really good. So maybe just talk a little bit about the assortment and the health of the inventory into the holiday here. And then I have a follow-up.

Fran Horowitz: Good morning, Corey. Yes, we’ve been reading inventory, it has been a hot topic this year. And we’ve been talking about it on every quarter, and we kicked off the year by saying that we had a strategy on our inventory, which was really to pull it forward and get ourselves set up for the most important quarter of the year. So last year, we were struggling with both closures in Vietnam with our product as well as a lot of supply chain issues, and we were not going to disappoint our customers again. So we were able to get to about 36%, which is what I mentioned in my script, half of where we were last quarter. But to your point, that inventory is current. It’s 92% current. We did a lot of adjusting of our inventory as we start to see the consumer respond to our product in the second quarter.

So we’re pleased by category and by brand on where we currently are — and will be flat by the end of the year, which is what we had said as we said at our strategy. I think you said you had a follow-up.

Corey Tarlowe: Yes, could you just talk about how you think about the promotional environment as we head into holiday? It seems like people have been talking about more promotions that are expected to see ahead. Could you maybe just talk about how that is baked into the guide? And then, Scott, how you bridge that 5% to 7% operating margin, maybe some of the puts and takes for the Q4 that are associated with that.

Fran Horowitz: Sure. So we’re heading into — this is a big week of the quarter. I think everybody knows it’s the most promotional quarter of the year. Our promotional strategy, as we’ve stated many times, is based on what is and isn’t working for us, not what is happening relative to other retailers that are out there. I’m very proud to say that our promotions are considerably less than where we were pre-pandemic and flat to where we were last year. We’re seeing some nice selling already from some categories and some cold weather categories. So we are positioned to compete, and I’m personally looking forward to being out in the malls and seeing all that consumer energy this weekend.

Scott Lipesky: As we think about that promo environment kind of bridging to the operating margin, we will see — we expect to see Abercrombie AURs up again. They were up nicely there in Q3 and Hollister was down in Q3 as we continue to push on that back-to-school inventory. Again, that was inventory that we bought earlier in the year before that trend fell down kind of in that June time period. So we expect to see the same thing play through in Q4, Abercrombie AUR up, Hollister down a little bit as we continue to push through that clearance, that carryover clearance. As we think about bridging the 5% to 7% operating margin, the good thing is as we’re getting closer to last year, whenever we really started to see the freight come in, so we’ll still be below 2021 levels.