Melinda Whittington: Good morning, Brad. Yeah. So Joybird, two things are happening. I think if you look across e-com, you’re starting to see that consumer growth more broadly look like the broader furniture industry, right? So I think there’s some pacing there that we’ll take out execution, right to really over perform and we’re still very bullish on what the Joybird brand can do. In this quarter, as you alluded to, we had sort of a one-time effect as well that we’re still working our way through. And it’s just a matter of, you think about marketing mix modeling that you’ve done over the years, now it’s more technical, right and involves more algorithms and artificial intelligence and so forth. And as we move to some more automated solutions, we just affected the traffic that we had coming to our site.
So that’s been reversed. And again, too early, as I said in my prepared comments, too early to claim complete victory, but we’re certainly seeing improvement as we back that out. But that said, I do think that consumer is going to — so the movement in the growth I expect is probably going to look a little bit more like the rest of the industry, like our more brick-and-mortar type of businesses. So what that says for us is, one, it takes out execution, it takes a great brand. And it also says, we need to optimize costs and sort of structure the business to prepare for that type of an execution. So with all of that kind of rounded out, we still feel great about the brand, it still resonates very well with consumers. Our stores are doing well.
As I noted, we’re going to be up to 10 stores by this summer and our path as we have 25 identified, we may manage pace a bit, but we’ll have 10 open here by this summer. And we’re going to continue to invest on that brand even some of the honing we’ve done over the last quarter on the messaging to make sure we’re really enticing that that consumer with fresh post-pandemic messaging just like we’re doing across the rest of our brands looks to be resonating. So we still feel good about the long term, not thrilled about some of the challenges in the near term, but we’ll work our way through that.
Brad Thomas: That’s really helpful, Melinda. And if I could just ask a follow-up about kind of the state of promotions in the industry. It’s one that obviously always has promotions over the holiday weekends. It feels like a number of brands out there trying to kind of still stay disciplined on promotions and not do kind of blanket store wide, getting discounts and only use some closer selling items. But every month that goes by, it feels like we’re sending more and more promotions as we do our checks. I’d be curious what you’re seeing out there and how much you think that might be a risk to your medium doing more promotions over the next six to 12 months here?
Bob Lucian: Yeah, Brad. As you — we started, so think of Labor Day, from Labor Day all the way through Presidents’ Day, that’s the promotions kind of continue to increase over that period because you see some over Columbus and you see a lot in Black Friday, but you see more New Year’s. And then finally, the biggest one is of the year for everybody is going to be Presidents’ Day. So just to seek increased promotions — promotional activity like that is not unexpected. Generally speaking, very few things are sold on a non-promotion basis and they’re priced that way, so that they can do a 30% off or 35% off and hit the margins that we’re delivering in the marketplace. What we’re keeping an eye on is people doing 50% off, 60% off, those types of items that’s where folks are getting desperate trying to get rid of inventory, trying to generate cash from their inventory if they’re running into — if they’re running into again cash flow problems, et cetera.
So that’s what we have our eye on. Again, we continue to look at that, we are working with our sales force to understand what’s happening out there and we are making sure that we are putting out promotions as we do our planning for the back half of the year that will ensure that we stay competitive.
Melinda Whittington: I would just add that input costs overall, while they’re mitigating somewhat from all-time highs, we’re not seeing dramatic relief beyond sort of containers for ocean freight. And so you tend to see a little bit more those Asian import kind of products where there’s more room and a cost deceleration. As Bob said, we’re going to keep our — very much keep our thumb on the pulse of what the consumers — how the consumer is acting and what they’re looking for. But we also believe that quality certainly deserves a little bit of a price premium, but it’s got to be within the right range, no doubt.
Brad Thomas: Really helpful. Thank you all so much.
