Our business has grown dramatically. And it’s — when you grow business the way it’s grown, you’re always — it’s hard to get that infrastructure at as quick as the sales are growing. So we’re playing a little bit of catch-up in ’23.
Operator: Next question; Dana Telsey with Telsey Group.
Dana Telsey: Nice to see the fourth quarter results. As you’re taking a look at next year and you talked a little about some of the increases in expenses, as you think about each brand, where could — could they — if it was better than expected, are there new products or categories that we should be looking for as we go through this year? And then just lastly, on the wholesale business. where you talked about flat, I believe. What are you seeing on the wholesale business overall? And how do you think about the health of the consumer with the exit rate as you exited the quarter?
Tom Chubb: Okay. Dana, I’ll start with the wholesale question and I think that we’re planning on it being flat, as you know very well because you follow so many of these people. Most of the major retailers are being very, very careful and cautious about their forward inventory buys. Most of them are actually buying down on a year-over-year basis. So in our view and we see this in the results that we’re achieving on the selling floor. Flat is actually an outperform in the wholesale this year. So we’re really pretty happy with that. And while we’d love to see growth, we also like to see the big retailers being prudent about their inventory buy. Then on the health of the consumer, what I would tell you and this shows up very much in our fourth quarter results, is that the health of the consumer has been good for the consumers that we service, I think the health of the consumer has been good.
We expect it to continue to be good We’re not looking for a major macro rebound in the economy but we think our consumer will hold up pretty well through the year. And I think the primary risk at this point to be very direct about it, is probably what’s been happening in the banking world and the Fed and sort of regulatory response to that. Our belief is that we will get through that the Fed and the regulators. So navigate us through that without it becoming a much larger problem. But that would be the one sort of uncontrollable factor that I think is out there at the moment. And again, we think they’re going to get through it. Our consumer will hold up. But this week, in particular, it’s hard not to have that sort of top of mind. And what was the third thing?
Dana Telsey: Opportunities?
Tom Chubb: Opportunities Yes, from a product or category standpoint, Dana, I think that there are some big opportunities that are really more about growing existing categories. So I think in Tommy Bahama in the women’s dress category, we’ve got a lot of room to run our dress business, has been very strong there. But I think we continue to build that. And as you know, that is a very large category within the total apparel market. I would tell you the same thing within Johnny Was. I think they have a very large opportunity in dresses in particular. And again, they’re having very good success with they’re building it very nicely. Historically, they’ve been a little light on dresses as a percentage of their total. And I think they’ve got lots of room to grow there.
