Duluth Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:DLTH) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Dave Loretta: Well, no, we haven’t seen heightened — I mean, it’s been improving over the last six months relative to the prior year. We see it stabilizing but not recovering from that pressure standpoint that we entered the year. We anticipated the back half would be — starting to see more recovery a little more of the full price, and that might play out, but we’re not going to expect it, and we’re planning for that pressure to continue. So, back half of the year, the guidance implies gross profit margins compressing 20 to 50 basis points to get to the full-year guidance that I articulated. And that’s significantly down from the first part of this year and the first quarter, in particular. So, all assured that the goal would be to again keep inventory moving and keep the customers engaged through the period that they’re in.

Sam Sato: Dylan, I’ll add to that because I think that there is an important distinction here. The frequency of events and promotions were reducing. The issue becomes the customer is responding in terms of their purchases when we do run targeted promotions or a couple of our big events, they’re just spending more and purchasing more during those periods, thus driving our full price selling down. And so we’re going to be balanced and targeted in the amount of offers that we put out there and the degree that we discount our products, but ultimately, when we do those things, just what we’re seeing is customers are just responding to a greater degree and purchasing more during those periods than not.

Dylan Carden: Got it. And so, I guess, as you’re kind of looking at negative margin here, operating margin, the swing factor looking at next year, presumably kind of recovering some full price selling on gross margin, but sort of holding that constant in the low-50 range, how should we think about the efficiencies or the SG&A leverage opportunity on new distribution? Is there any way you can kind of quantify that or — as we look to next year?

Dave Loretta: Well, at this stage, Dylan — and it’s probably not appropriate for me to about next year. We’re — we’ll provide that — the team will provide that on a fourth quarter call coming up. So — but you can look into the back part of this year and in our fourth quarter, when we — we see just incremental sales growth, and it doesn’t need to be much, leverage on SG&A is immediate. We expect leverage on SG&A in the fourth quarter and really in the back half of the year. So, it doesn’t take much top line to start to see it flow through, which is kind of where we’re at in the business model.

Dylan Carden: Okay. And then, the new distribution — apologies, I forgot, allows for a bigger wholesale business. Do I have that right? How are you thinking about expansion of wholesale?

Sam Sato: Yes. Well, it allows for a larger business in totality. That facility — the plan is to have it fulfill about 60% of our online and retail store inventory replenishment, about 60% of that by the end of Q3. And so, the opportunity for us to just grow the business in general, whether it’s a combination of our current retail and DTC businesses or bolting on a wholesale business. And even, as we’ve talked, down the road, the potential of an acquisition, that network not only has the capacity to do that but it’s going to do it at a highly cost-efficient manner.

Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session as well as the conference. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.

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