Kirkland’s, Inc. (NASDAQ:KIRK) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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And then I guess I would say in terms of sort of disappointment, obviously, the furniture and wall categories continue to turn a little slower than we would like them to. It’s categories that we are down trending as well, so nothing that I don’t think we can’t manage through. But we were very pleased that between the in-store traffic the improvement and conversion that we were able to overcome those deficits and fourth quarter was the categories that really drove fast turning sales.

John Lawrence: And just to, go through January a little bit, obviously, it cost you a point, point and a half. I assume that, any stores here, in the Med South where I assume closed for several days, real impact. I assume not only customers couldn’t get to the store, but neither could employees, correct?

Mike Madden: Yes. John, that was true. I mean, I think we just the way our store footprint is laid out, we took the brunt of that. So it was about $2 million, we mentioned that in Amy’s remarks about it would have been a little bit closer to 3% on the comp had it been kind of a normal month. I mean, we know whether gives and it takes. So we’ll be up against this next year. Hopefully, that will help January and at the end of this fiscal year, but yes.

John Lawrence: So last question for me is when you look at the store fleet, the 9 or 10 stores you closed during the quarter, as you look at that and Amy, when you took the top spot and you and you look across the fleet of stores, are there some of those I assume with these changes over the last 6 months and improvement, there’s some of those stores that are staying open that would have been closed. Is that fair?

Amy Sullivan: Certainly. I mean, we’ve seen improvements definitely in some of our former top volume stores that sort of returned to their top spot, and that’s really also kind of driving force behind this wish list of stores that we’re targeting for potential new openings, too. If you go back and look at the store closures over the past 3 to 4 years at Kirkland’s on an old strategy, it made sense at the time perhaps to close some of those stores because of the market they were in. But as we reposition, we were able to use some customer data to sort of overlay on our old real estate map and our new real estate map and some very obvious opportunities where there’s a dense population of our current core customer where we could go back into those and really stimulate sales. So, on both ends, seeing some positivity and our sort of historic real estate strategy really resonating with the changes that we’ve made.

John Lawrence: And just the idea that can you give us a sense of how many of stores are close to that you know, 1.2, 1.4, and gaining on those numbers as we speak. And, I know there’s work to be done there, but a sense of some of those who’ve got to be approaching those numbers?

Mike Madden: Yes. I mean, that’s an average. So we’re currently at like a between $1 million and $1.1 million let say. And I’m really talking about stores. We’re not allocating any e-comm necessarily to that other than BOPIS. But I think to Amy’s point, what we’ve seen, I think the takeaway for now on what the merchandise strategy and how that is feeding into our stores, what we’re seeing is some of the historical strong market areas that we’ve been in are picking up faster than maybe some of the more recent ones that we did in, say, the last 5 years or so. So I think that speaks to a customer base that knows us, that has been with us over these years and is seeing the changes that we’ve implemented over the last 12 months starting to show up.

And that’s drawing her in, and I think that’s part of the traffic increase we’re seeing in the stores right now. So more to come on that, but I think that’s why we think if we look at like we have built a wish list and we don’t know how many opportunities will really present themselves so quickly, but we want to be there and ready to go because we feel strongly that if we fill back into some of these areas, we’ll be successful.

Operator: At this time, this completes our question-and-answer session and concludes today’s teleconference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.

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