Nordstrom, Inc. (NYSE:JWN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Matthew Boss: Great. Thanks. So, Erik, could you elaborate on more recent trends that you’re seeing maybe across income cohorts in particular, I think you cited the softening more at the lower income side. And maybe could you touch on trends that you’re seeing on the designer end? And then, Michael, — just in terms of the phasing of the year, could you just maybe help bridge or walk through your confidence in the phasing of revenues front half down low double digits to the up low single digits in the back half of the year.

Erik Nordstrom: Yes, Matthew. When we look at our customer cohorts, it’s pretty clear that the customer across the board is challenged, and there’s some softness, and I think particularly in discretionary areas, we have seen that softness more pronounced in our lower income in our Rack business. But it’s safe to say that we’ve seen a pullback across our customers. For designer, I think Pete can go into that a little deeper.

Pete Nordstrom: Yes. The cider business for us, I mean, to put this in context, I think this may be the first quarterly call I’ve been on the last 10 years, what I didn’t say designer was one of our best-performing categories last month — or last quarter. So, I think it’s important to keep this in context. I mean one quarter is not a trend make here. And to put it in a different context, last year, we did more refiners sales than we’ve ever done in the history of our company. We had double-digit increase. So, what happened to us though is that we had a very large double-digit increase trend going with our sales that dropped rather precipitously to more normalized levels. And so, as a result, right now, we find ourselves with too much designer inventory in this moment.

And so, we’re working through that, and we’ll have to make some adjustments on some onward in the near term. But these cyclical things happen in this business, and we’ll be able to work through that. But I think the good news is our customers over a long period of time have showed a strong interest in the designer business, and it’s something that’s really important to our overall success, and we have good partnerships there. and again, continues to be an important part of our business and what our customers expect.

Michael Maher: So, Matt, you had asked about the revenue cadence between the first and the second half. So, let me talk about a few factors there that led us to set the outlook out that way. So first of all, those more difficult comparisons in the first half. Not that 2019 is necessarily the perfect baseline. But if you just look at the way last year progressed relative to that, in the first half of the year, we were up mid-single digits. And in the back half of the year, we were down mid-single digits relative to 2019. So just on the current run rate, we’ve got an easier comparison that gives you a sense of the order of magnitude of that. The other thing is we’ve talked about is those choices we made around digital sales earlier in 2022, both Racks or fulfillment and also discontinuing our Trunk Club business.