Express, Inc. (NYSE:EXPR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Dana Telsey: No problem. As we’re looking at the results today, Tim, and where you are, and obviously identifying the issue with the women’s business, as you look through the cadence of the year for improvement, what should we be seeing in that women’s business and how you’re thinking about maintaining the momentum of the men’s business? And then I have a follow-up.

Tim Baxter: Sure. So, what we should be seeing in the women’s business or what you should be seeing in the women’s business is improved balance in the assortments. So, improved balance between dressy and casual, improved balance, particularly in tops, and that is across silhouette and across price points. So, you’ll see — you should see improved balance in good, better, and best pricing across our tops assortment. And you should begin to see great iterations of all of our iconic styles. And I want to be sure — Marni asked on the last call, she doesn’t want to see Portofino walls and the Portofino is one of our iconic styles, and the team has done a phenomenal job of iterating against all of our icons. So, as we move through the year, you’ll begin to see better balance in the assortments.

You’ll continue to see great fashion deliveries, which have continued to perform well for us. And you’ll see the reimagining of all of our icons across all of the categories and a reintroduction of many of those icons across the categories in the women’s business. In the men’s business, it’s really all about, to your point, sustaining the momentum that we have seen over the past several years. And that strategy is not different than women’s, except that it is about sustaining not turning around. We’ve had great balance in our men’s assortments. We have grabbed market share in categories that were previously not core categories for us, like denim, like knits, like men’s chinos. And so, you’ll see us continuing to take market share across all categories in men’s and continuing to drive the businesses that were very well known for, like men’s suits.

We had a fantastic year in men’s suits and men’s dress shirts. Another fantastic year in men’s dress shirts. And the same thing that I talked about in women’s where we are sort of reinventing and reintroducing our icons will also be happening in men’s. We’ve recently introduced several iterations of our iconic 1MX shirt in men’s, and each one of those has performed extraordinarily well. So, you’ll continue to see us doing that throughout the year too.

Dana Telsey: Got it. When I look at channels, looks like the eCommerce business declined more than the stores channel and outlet performed better than some of the regular retail stores. How you’re planning the different channels? What did you see in the components of the comps, whether it’s traffic conversion? And then on the merchant margin, which is I think impacted by 280 basis points, which is a little bit better than the 360 in the prior quarter, how do you see that moving forward? Thank you.

Tim Baxter: So, from a channel perspective, Dana, certainly we did experience a slowdown in our eCommerce business as the year progressed, as we moved through the year, culminating in that more significant drop in the fourth quarter. I think two things are happening in eCommerce. Number one, we’ve seen and heard from many of our competitors a similar story about some pretty aggressive slowdowns in the eCommerce business in 2022 as consumers returned to shopping in stores. Something that hadn’t happened for a couple of years, while we were living under the influences of the pandemic. So, I think that was part one of our eCommerce challenge. The second part was the challenges that we faced in our women’s business, which is very highly penetrated online.