Urban Outfitters, Inc. (NASDAQ:URBN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Richard Hayne: Lorraine, I believe I don’t have the exact number in front of me, but I believe the Urban brand in North America is — AUR is up about 5%. That’s pretty close, as I say, close to pre ones. And I think that it wasn’t necessarily — we didn’t raise prices according to a plan, again, to save the opening price points of some of the items we sell, but it was more — I don’t want to say across the board, but it was many more items than we probably should have done. So I think that when we plan for FY ’24, I expect that we will plan not up much in any of the categories, but actually bringing some prices down versus what we are doing right now.

Frank Conforti: This is Frank. Just to sort of add to the both Kimberly and Lorraine’s question as it relates to next year and some of the some of the positives that we have going, honestly, for all three brands. One, we’ve talked about a slight improvement here in IMU in the third quarter and an improving trend, and we believe we’ve had some positive IMU in the fourth quarter. And that is due in part to significant improvements in the cost as well as speed of the supply chain, and that should continue to be a nice tailwind. We’re hoping this should continue to be a nice tailwind into next year. Secondarily, I also just want to talk about the markdown rates. As we’re adjusting our inventory and getting that to be more in line with sales and believing inventory can probably even lag sales next year, driving a faster turn, lower rates of supply, again, due to improved supply chain.

That in and of itself should help our markdown rates. So one part of markdown is obviously the difficulty that TAM leaders have in getting fashion right and the other is just dealing with excess inventory. And knock on wood, we’ve made significant improvement in our inventory position from the second quarter to the third. We think we’re going to make notable improvement from third quarter to fourth entering to that fiscal ’24 full year with much leaner inventory and hopefully then have less reliance on having to markdown up to go through some excess inventory. So both of those things, I think, should be positive, not just for the Urban Outfitters brand, but for all of URBN as we head into next year.

Richard Hayne: And Lorraine and Kimberly both, just an update on the AUR. The prior year, the AUR at Urban was actually up almost 20%. And so when you see — think of a compounding effect of 5%, which might not seem like a lot, but when — 5% on top of the 20%, I think it’s more than the customer can afford and more than they want.

Operator: Thank you. Please standby for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Adrienne Yih with Barclays. Your line is open.

Adrienne Yih: Yes, thank you very much. My question is on inventory. I think all are. I guess when we look forward into — and it’s for Retail and for Wholesale, I’m trying to separate the two of them. But for Retail and specifically, when we look forward into Q1 ending inventory up about 32%, Q2 up about 44%. How much of that was in transit? And that in transit portion, if it’s double digit, your inventory on the balance sheet should go down double digit, but not impact your ability to comp. Is that a fair assessment? And then I just want to follow up on Wholesale.