Bath & Body Works, Inc. (NYSE:BBWI) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Olivia Tong: Thanks, good morning. I wanted to ask you about the loyalty members that are making up third of your base now? If you could give any insight in terms of whether you think the €“ your certain income level €“ how much more they are buying? It looks like if they are a third of your member base in two-third of sales, it’s obviously quite a big differential between their purchasing levels versus the other two-thirds. And then I just had €“ if I could sneak one more in, just around SG&A performance this quarter and how that influences your thoughts on the pace of improvement into fiscal €˜23. Because you talked about a handful of expenses last quarter that were higher in second half. So just kind of curious what came in better than expected? Because I imagine that wage inflation, some of the home expenses, those came in, in line with where you had anticipated? Thank you so much.

Wendy Arlin: Great. Thanks, Olivia. We will go to Julie for loyalty and then I’ll take SG&A.

Julie Rosen: Yes. So for our loyalty program, we are absolutely thrilled with the program. We’re pleased with enrollment and engagement, evidenced by our 65% local company sales. I think it’s important to remember, as Sarah mentioned, that our loyalty customer has a higher retention rate, higher spend, makes more ships and shop more cross-category and more than non-loyalty members. One thing that’s very exciting about our loyalty program is that we have exceptional mass rates on member data collection. And this is really going to enable us to help identify trends and changes in customer behavior and the data will help us enhance the effectiveness of our marketing. It will also help us create a more meaningful personalized experience that foster brand connection and capture share of wallet. And we have plans in the future to continue to evolve the program to further drive membership and spend.

Wendy Arlin: Thanks, Julie. On the SG&A, so a couple of comments on SG&A, our SG&A rate has increased compared to last year, which, of course, I know you saw in the numbers. And as we talked about in prior calls, I break down the rate increase compared to LY. About two-thirds of it was home office and about third of it was in our store selling cost structure. And maybe to start with stores, we made a very planned and thoughtful investment in our store associates as we went into this time period. We did increase wage rates for our store associates, including a premium for the fall season. What we’ve discovered is that investment has been very successful. Our stores are fully staffed. We had success recruiting. So we’re very confident that, that investment will pay off as we go into Q4 because we have great store associates hired and we are ready to go.

In terms of the other increase year-over-year, it is home office. As I’ve talked about, we continue to make investments there as well. So we’re in the process of investing in technology to separate from Victoria’s Secret. We’ve also invested in our home office folks as well. In terms of the favorability to beginning of quarter, I would say two things are driving it. Number one, as we emphasized in our prepared remarks, we continue to try to manage expenses thoughtfully and frugally during this quarter, we are being very thoughtful about where we spend our money, just given the macro environment out there. So we did see some expense favorably across the board. The other thing that did come in favorable this quarter is our technology spend was favorable to plan.

We’re just seeing a little bit of ramp-up, the ramp-up in terms of the work on separation occurred a little bit slower than what we expected, but that’s going well, but it did result in some expense favorability compared to beginning of quarter expectations. Thank you for your question. Next question please.

Operator: Our next question comes from Ike Boruchow. Your line is now open.