Steven Madden, Ltd. (NASDAQ:SHOO) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: We have a follow -up from the line of Samuel Poser with Williams Trading.

Samuel Poser: Thank you. Two things. One, to follow up on Dana’s question, on the wholesale brand on the Steven Madden and Dolce Vita footwear there, sort of the better wholesale businesses, are the retailers opening up enough? When Macy’s spoke yesterday, they said that they wanted to buy more product of what people coming in and asking for, which would be theoretically you’d be one of those. But at the same time, they were talking about growing their private label business. So I’m just trying to get your interpretation of how that works out giving people what they want and then growing private label. And then I wanted to talk about sort of expanding the scope of your direct-to-consumer business getting to know more customers, building your database, or what’s being done there to increase that. Thank you.

Edward Rosenfeld : Yes, look, I think, I don’t know what else I can say about what’s going on with the department stores. We feel, we believe that we are confident that we’re very important vendors for them, that we’re going to get more than our fair share, that we’re positioned to take share, frankly, in that channel. Overall, their sentiment does remain cautious, though, and we’ll have to see how that develops over the course of the year. Obviously, if their comp store sales improve, that will incur, I believe that will encourage them to get more aggressive, and I think we’ll be very well positioned to participate, if that happens. In terms of DTC, look, that’s clearly been — we’ve been increasing the penetration significantly over the last several years in DTC, and we continue – we expect to continue to that so back in 2019, I think we were 18% in DTC.

We finished 2023 up 800 basis points in penetration, so pretty significant growth in DTC there. And obviously, this year, when if you include Almost Famous, you won’t see that percentage go up, but if you exclude Almost Famous, you’re seeing continued penetration increase in DTC, and that will continue to be a long-term initiative for us to build that business and have more of those direct relationships that you talked about with the consumer.

Operator: That concludes the question and answer session. This time, I would like to turn the call back to Ed Rosenfeld for closing remarks.

Edward Rosenfeld : All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. Have a great day. We look forward to speaking with you on the next call.

Operator: Thank you for your participation in today’s conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.