We’ve added a number of brands with a lot more coming. So we’re investing in both the online and the in-store remodels and experiences to really bolster that. I mean the last is really personalized offers and communications, which has so many benefits when you talk about relevancy of communication that goes to customers reducing €“ giving value very specific targeted value to certain customers. And so we are running lots of tests. We’re reaching tens of millions of customers. We €“ that we’ve always got something going on each week and we are very encouraged by the early results, but we’re not expecting on this particular one to see meaningful benefit until the end of 2024. So, all these initiatives are really intended to drive long-term profitable sales growth, which we’re targeting to achieve in 2024 and beyond.
So I’ll €“ we will give you more updates as we get into all of our earnings calls, but I’ll turn it over to Adrian for the second part of your question.
Adrian Mitchell: Good morning, Brook and thank you for your question €“ excuse me. The first thing I would say is that we do enter 2023 in a position of strength. When you think about our disciplined inventories down 3% to last year, down 18% to 2019, our data-driven decisions, our financial and operational health, which from an execution standpoint has been on display in 2022, we really step into 2023 with confidence. But we also recognize that the consumer remains under heightened pressure. So as we think about the sales guide path for 2023, let me just kind of walk through kind of how we thought about it, which will provide a bit more context on the improved trajectory that we see for 2023. So in the first quarter, if you reflect on 2022, the first quarter was our strongest quarterly year-over-year compare.
We’re up 13.6% last year in the first quarter. And this was a point in time when we were effectively government stimulus was still out there. There was a clear resurgence in terms of return to work, occasion, travel, and there was inventory constraints that we’re really beginning to loosen but still a little bit tight at that point in time. As we got into the second quarter, the consumer was still relatively healthy, and inflationary pressures began to intensify as consumers begin to reallocate from goods to services. So we saw that pivot begin to kind of pick up and as the supply chains loosened in inventory really flow into the retail context, the promotional landscape began to intensify. Now as we think about the third and fourth quarters, the macro pressures, the excess inventory surpluses the continued inflation really created a lot of challenges that you’re very aware of as we think about the third and fourth quarters.
So as we think about the compare to last year, you have an intensifying period over the course of last year. And what we’re saying is that we expect to have more of a recovery as we think about our trajectory from the first quarter to the second quarter as well as targeting sales growth in 2024. And we assume that this growth that we expect in 2024 will remain in a situation where the consumer remains under pressure. But given the growth vectors that we’ve discussed, we have confidence that we can achieve that growth by 2024 from an annual basis. So that gives you a little bit of a sense of the composition. Now as we think about the fourth quarter, the only thing I would add is we learned a lot about gifting in 2022. That was a real strength for us and we’re excited about what we’re actually positioning ourselves to do in the fourth quarter of 2023.
So that certainly gives us confidence in addition to the 53rd week, which we will benefit from in the fourth quarter.
Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Oliver Chen of TD Cowen. Please go ahead.
