Ollie’s Bargain Outlet Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:OLLI) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

John Swygert: Yeah. Kate, obviously we called out the strong categories on the call, the categories that we would say were under-performers would not be surprising to the overall market. Our underperformers in the quarter were furniture, domestics, and clothing, most all of that is discretionary in nature or seasonally driven in nature with what we are seeing, I would tell you going into Q4, two of those three categories are no longer the underperforming category. So we’ve definitely seen some turnarounds in the domestics and clothing arena going into Q4. Furniture is something we have made a concerted effort to reduce in the last couple of years. There’s not high demand for it. Biggest furniture category is really in the mattresses and that’s something that we are still in but most others, we really deemphasized the furniture category intentionally.

Kate McShane: Thank you.

Operator: And one moment for our next question. And our next question will come from Edward Kelly of Wells Fargo. Your line is open, Edward.

Edward Kelly: Hi, good morning everybody. Question I have for you on just promotional cadence in Q3. I believe there was a 15% off coupon that you didn’t run early in addition to the flyer that shifted. So I’m curious if the impact overall was bigger than the 1% hit that you had talked about. And then as we think about Q4, that flyer shifts in. So do you still think that’s a 100 basis points based on what we saw? And then what about like any other couponing or sort of promotional considerations that we should be thinking about?

Eric van der Valk: Hi, Ed, it’s Eric. I’ll take the question. I think maybe in reverse order, that ad shift, print, and digital were primarily driven by the Print dates. It met our expectations shifting out of Q3 into Q4. So we are expecting that shift to be as you said, approximately 100 basis points into Q4. In terms of promotions, in general, whether coupon or other promotions, we run coupon promotions from time to time, although we are not promotional in nature. We are not a high-low retailer. We do run promotions as you’ve mentioned, from time to time and it’s not an exact science. We look at a number of factors including variances in way the calendar falls, timing of holidays for example, there is an extra Saturday or meaningful weekend, in this Christmas season holiday season in front of us, business needs or inventory content, and kind of where we stand and we make decisions tactical sometimes in the moment to promote based on all of those factors.

We have no plans to run any additional promotions this year at this point.

Edward Kelly: Got it. Okay. And go ahead, I’m sorry.

Eric van der Valk: No, go ahead, sorry.

Edward Kelly: Okay. And then just holiday in general, I was curious if you could maybe talk about the product offering that you have lined up. What are you seeing so far in terms of consumer response, demand, especially as it pertains to like post-Thanksgiving at this point? And I guess how does current trends sort of line up with the comp guide that you’ve got laid out for us?

Eric van der Valk: Yeah. There’s obviously — there’s still lot of business to do between today and December 24, one of our biggest days of the year is this coming Sunday. So we would tell you, we feel good where we are sitting today. Trends are in line with where we want to be at. So we are very excited of what we’ve seen from the consumer response perspective. There is definitely a little uncertainty out there in the marketplace with the consumer and the demand. I believe our values are winning and the customers are responding to our values that we are providing to them. So there is a long shopping period that we’re dealing with as well. So we’ve got a lot to go. We feel good where we are positioned. Our offerings are strong and we’ll see where it lands out for the end of the season.

Edward Kelly: Can I just squeeze one more in on SG&A? Could you quantify incentive comp for the quarter? And then what’s the drag on that going to be in Q4?

Rob Helm: Sure. This is Rob. Incentive comp was about 50 basis points of a headwind to the fourth quarter. So if you factor that in with the 40 basis points of leverage we showed in the financials, we got 90 — we would have gotten 90 basis points of leverage this quarter with the 7 comp which we were pretty pleased with. For the fourth quarter, it’s about a 60 basis point headwind and we’ve included that consideration in our guidance.

Edward Kelly: Great. Thank you, guys.

Eric van der Valk: Thanks, Ed.

Operator: And one moment for our next question. Our next question will come from Jason Haas of Bank of America. Your line is open.

Jason Haas: Great. Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. I’m curious if you could talk about some of the improvements that you’ve made to the business over the past year or so in order to better capitalize on this environment where folks are searching for value. So I’m curious in terms of like supply chain and store operations, if you could just talk about some of the projects, you’ve been working on there?