Macy’s, Inc. (NYSE:M) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jeff Gennette: Yes, Matt, I think I got most of your question, you were cut off a little bit at the front. But I would tell you that kind of pre and post pandemic kind of how I would characterize Macy’s, I’d say the headline here is that we’re a more modern department store. I talk about it in kind of 5 buckets. The first one would be we have the right talent and team alignment and that everybody is very focused on executing the Polaris strategy with precision. I’d say the second thing that is a pre post pandemic headline would be just we’re in much better financial health. And when you look at it, we just have materially less leverage, little to no debt over the next 5 years. And I think we are executing a really disciplined capital allocation strategy.

I think the third one is the big bucket, is inventory control. That starts with just really a big focus on strategic planning down into not only season quarter, category, brand, et cetera. That really translates into the buying team is more conservative than what they’re buying. And they’re also retaining a nice reserve so that they can respond in season. We have also pulled in more data science to really give us where the customer shifts are going by category, by brand, by value bands. Also included in inventory control is a more modernized supply chain. And so we certainly have diversified our private brand manufacturing. We diversified our port entry and we’re deploying more sophisticated forecasting and allocation tools. I’d say the fourth bucket just is — which I think is in the middle innings of our development is pricing science and just a real disciplined focus on sell-throughs turnover in GMROI and then using just increased automation to help us respond to that.

And then if I had to pick a fifth, I would say that — and this is in the very early innings, it’s just our vision and early execution with the private brand strategy. I think it’s one of the biggest volume drivers that we’re going to have in the future. And as we see it right now with the INC Women’s brand, which has been revitalized as one of our best trending brands in the store, and we’ve got a lot of a pipeline of new content coming, which we’ll talk about in future calls. So just as an overall comment, I just think that from where we were pre-pandemic, we just have a real pipeline of innovation coming with loyalty and personalization. What we’re doing with marketplace, it’s a different company than we were back in March of 2020.

Adrian Mitchell: The only other thing I would add, Matt, is that to Jeff’s second point, we do have the financial capacity and the wherewithal to continue to invest in modernizing our business as a modern department store. When you just look at the math, we’re stronger, we’re more agile. We’re financially healthier so that we can continue to make the investments in the business. And Jeff and I and the management team have a pipeline of other initiatives underway, but we’re very much focused on profitable sales growth. That’s our longer-term focus.

Operator: We will take our next question from Omar Saad from Evercore Partners. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

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