Samuel Poser: Good morning, everybody/ Thank you very much and Patrick, congratulations as well. I want to just talk about the inventory for a second. And could you tell us, Carl or anybody, what your optimum inventory turn would be? Because even getting the inventories down to where you’re planning to get them, it still leaves you with a far greater of forward weeks of supply than you’ve had back — if you want to go back — if you want to go way back to when your business was smaller. So, I’m wondering what that optimum turn — annual turn would be and where you’re trying to get the inventories too?
Carl Scibetta: Sam, as in the past, we’re not going to give out what inventory turn targets we have. What I’ll tell you is the rightsizing or in our mind, the optimizing where we think the inventory should be, continues out through 2024, and we certainly feel we’ll have internal improvements in ’24 to where we were in 2023. As I said before, we’re carefully surgically reducing inventory to ensure that we’re not damaging the business and we’re still able to deliver the shoes and the products our customers want and fill back into what’s working. So, it is an ongoing process like I have stated and like we’ve talked in the past, it is a long-term strategy more than a 90-day strategy to get where we want to go and keep the business as healthy as it could possibly be.
Sam Poser: Thanks. And then can you talk also about — you talked about the traffic and you talked about the e-commerce sales. Can you, one, give us the variance of e-commerce sales between Shoe Station and Shoe Carnival? And secondly, can you tell us what your — you had the traffic down 11%. Can you talk about — I assume that’s store traffic, can you talk about conversion rate within that as well, please?
Patrick Edwards: Hi Sam, it’s Patrick. Thanks for the question. With respect to e-commerce growth, it’s split about evenly between the two banners, the growth this period. And with respect to conversion, our conversion rate remains the highest that it’s ever been. It has some variation within it from quarter-to-quarter but overall, it remains about 400 basis points higher from where it was back in 2019.
Sam Poser: When you say e-commerce was evenly split, so it was up 10% in both — at both?
Patrick Edwards: Well, the e-commerce website didn’t exist at Shoe Station last year, so its growth is 100%. But just on balance, the growth in our overall e-commerce business was evenly split with growth out of both banners.
Sam Poser: So, you were up at shoecarnival.com as well as up against nothing?
Patrick Edwards: Yes.
Sam Poser: Okay. I mean, I want to ask the same question. I mean you talked about how good how — good you felt about Shoe Station. It sounds like it’s quite good and you’re giving overall comps. So, I mean, I think from a disclosure perspective, providing — for people to understand your business to provide the comp for both banners it may be in time for an exception here, just so people can sort of understand what’s going on. I know it’s not a thing you normally do, but people want to hear it. And I think it’s important. I don’t think it’s giving away the firm to tell anybody that.
Patrick Edwards: Hey Sam, I appreciate the input, and I enjoy that. We’ll take it under advisement, and we will consider that in future calls, but we’re just not prepared to do that today.
Sam Poser: Okay, thanks very much.
Operator: And we will take our next question from Jim Chartier with Monness, Crespi, Hardt. Your line is open.
Jim Chartier: Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Let me add my congratulations, Patrick as well. Can you just talk about what do you think has been driving the acceleration in the Shoe Station sales over the last three quarters? And then following up, what’s kind of the store opening plan for next year with Shoe Station?
Mark Worden: Hey, Jim, it’s Mark. Good morning. Thanks for joining today. Three things are working very well for Shoe Station. First, it’s a higher-income consumer as I talked about in my speech. The lion’s share is over 50,000 in large segments over 75,000. And we’re seeing the health of that consumer significantly better than the health of the consumer, and that’s up 30,000 urban consumer, so number one, a healthy consumer base compared to the other parts of our business. Number two, we fully integrated Shoe Station onto our Shoe Perks CRM platform, and we’ve fully launched the shoestation.com business. So we’re now able to rapidly get new customer acquisition and start talking to them through our Shoe Perks program. We gained over double-digit growth of Shoe Perks memberships through Shoe Station, and we’re talking to them actively building that loyalty, building those purchase occasions.
