The Children’s Place, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLCE) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Marni Shapiro: A lot of my questions have actually been answered, but I just have a couple of quick follow-ups. The holiday line and the Pajamas look outstanding. So this is clearly not a product issue. This is like you said pulling back. But it sounds like you’re saying that the worst of your expenses are now have peaked and it’s starting to abate heading into ’23. If you could just confirm that’s what we were hearing? And then I guess, could you talk a little bit just about the marketing costs and how we should think about this going into ’23. Have — are you seeing any abatement in the marketing costs from social media, for example, Facebook and Instagram marketing costs have gone much higher? You guys are spending more there. So can you just walk us through what that looks like in ’23 as well?

Jane Elfers: Sure. I think we have answered some of those, Marni. We have a lot of macro challenges that are impacting us this year in 2022. We talked about decade high cotton prices and decade high AUCs. So the good news is cotton is moderating, and we’re going to start to see that in the back half of ’23 with the back-to-school buys. We’re coming out of a 100-year pandemic. The good news is those effects are starting to moderate as well. We’ve talked pretty extensively this morning about supply chain costs, and I assume we’ll continue to talk about them. But this is the peak year for them, and certainly, Q4 is the peak quarter for them. And so we will do what we need to do to get our inventories clean and start to see those supply chain costs start to moderate in 2023.

We’ve spoken about inflation, we’ve spoken about where our customer is certainly. They have 1 bucket of spend and a higher and higher piece of it is going towards necessity. So we’ll do what we can to stimulate the discretionary buying as we talked about. I think the good news is there’s a lot more opportunities. We have a lot more long-term opportunities than we do short-term challenges. So we covered a lot of them today. We’ve covered it this year. We’re a different company than we were before the pandemic. We’ve been on offense for the last 3 years. We’ve restructured the company and what I would consider I guess, I’ve been in the business for a long time, I would say that this is certainly the most challenging time I felt in retail history.

And so staying on offense has been important for us. You look back at what we do from a product point of view, we’ve launched I guess, Maegan 3 brands since €“ 3, right?

Maegan Markee: Yes.

Jane Elfers: Three brands since the start of the pandemic. We’ve talked about making the pivot to a digital-first company. 50% of our business this year is going to come from digital, 60% by the end of ’24. It’s our highest operating margin channel. Our Amazon business is surging, the marketing function is working. It’s measurable. We’re acquiring new customers at a healthy rate. Our brand awareness metrics are exploding. We talked about today on the call pivoting to like a digital acquisition model, if you will, from a store acquisition model in what we think is a pretty remarkably short period of time, keeping up with where the millennial customer, which we spoke a lot about today, wants to be and wants to shop. Maegan brought up social media, and I’ll have Josh answer your question about spend, but we’ve gotten a lot, lot smarter about spend.