Lands’ End, Inc. (NASDAQ:LE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Alex Fuhrman: Wow. That’s exciting. Thank you for that. And then, kids, sounds like kids have been down for you lately. That historically, has been a pretty strong category for Lands’ End. Do you have a sense of why that business has been weak, and are you expecting any improvement this year?

Andrew McLean: I think we’ve seen this weakness in the business because we’ve been in and out of it in a way. We had tried to license it going into the pandemic. We pulled that license back. We tried to run it ourselves, and we’ve under-resourced it. And I think for us, it’s a strategic decision about how we resource that appropriately going forward. We’ve talked about various ways to execute that business. We’re not going to walk away from kids, should be the takeaway in this, but we will look for ways to improve it, make sure it’s appropriately resourced and find its place in the family variety of Lands’ End.

Alex Fuhrman: Okay, that’s really helpful. Thank you very much.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question, and that will be coming from the line of Dana Telsey with Telsey Group. Your line is open.

Dana Telsey: Hi. Hope you can hear me now.

Andrew McLean: Yes, we can hear you now, Dana.

Dana Telsey: Oh, great. Hi, Andrew. Hi, Bernie. Great to hear from you. So, Andrew, you mentioned throughout the call the focus on data, and it seems like that’s one of the key elements that you are bringing to the Lands’ End brands. As you think about the different channels, you also mentioned the additional marketplaces. How do you see – whether it’s outfitters, whether it’s eCommerce, how do you see the channels penetration differing as you move forward, and what could that mean for margins? And then just in the near-term with the promotional environment, how are you planning in terms of margins to manage the promotional environment, whether by channel, whether by category? And then lastly on cotton costs and raw material costs, what does that mean for your cost of goods as we move through the year? And one more thing, retail. I think you had thought about retail as being a potential opportunity. Is it? Thank you.

Andrew McLean: All right. Thanks for the point. Let’s see. I’ll start with retail. It’s one of a list of things that we are evaluating, Dana, and it’s – I would say this, as we continue to refine and look at the ROI of retail, we think there is other priorities that are going to be ahead of it. So, I don’t see it being this year part of the strategy. You may see some experiments from us, but we’re not going to lean into that specifically. Coming back to it, we do see a lot of data. We have an amazing amount of data and the data – we stopped looking at the customer just in terms of a demographic, and we started looking at behavioral cohorts. And as we got further into those behavioral cohorts, we’ve seen that there are patterns in the customer that we can use to help them connect the dots across our categories.

So, whereas we have had cohorts for the customer tend to just shop one item, outer wear, that might be the shop that they are, swim, that might be the shop that they are, we will look for ways to connect them across our categories. The best example I can give you is the mom who’s shopping for a school uniform for her kids. It’s a great school uniform business for us. We see that she was leaning into our swim, and by encouraging her, by advertising to her directly, marketing to her with our catalogs, we’ve been able to engage her with our swim product. Once you get her into the swim product, we see that the collection of goods that sit around that, as I mentioned earlier, which is going to move from slides on her feet, hats on her head, and swim dresses in between.