Martin Waters: Yes, I’ll take the first part of that. Of course, it’s something we think about on a daily basis as we look at our results, how are we getting our fair share. Are we overperforming, or underperforming relative to the market? And when conversion is down and sales are down, generally, it’s an extreme cause for concern. So we go to the other indicators that we can find. Market share is a good one, not the only one, but it’s a good one. And our market share was up a nudge for the third quarter relative to where it was last year in intimates. That’s driven by strength in bras, so growth in bra market share and ever a slight reduction in share in panty. So within that, we could be satisfied with the overall performance of intimates, but look hard at the panty business and say, gosh, that’s a really promotional category.
We’re losing a little bit of ground. We’ve got to work harder. So that’s just one indicator. Another indicator we look at is the white balls tracker, which indicates that purchase intent was higher for Victoria’s than it was before. We look at our traffic relative to mall traffic to the extent we can get it and that other retailers share with us and landlord share with us, and that looks like it’s tracking. So we look across the dashboard and say, should we be satisfied? Should we be pleased? Should we be concerned? And I think we’re holding our own. Honestly, I think we’re there or thereabouts in the mix, and we’ve got it all to play for. December is the most important month of the year. We feel very well set up in terms of inventory, in terms of promotions, in terms of the activity we’ve got in the pipe.
So it’s all focused on execution right now. That’s what we get paid to do, and that’s what we’re focused on. TJ, do you want to take the second part?
TJ Johnson: Yes. I think the second part, Matt, from a macro perspective as we think about revenues going into next year, really what we talked about — remind everybody what we talked about at the Investor Day. Again, the North American side of the business, we do need to see some level of improvement. We believe from a macro perspective when does that come. And candidly, we’ll start to anniversary some of the challenges towards the end of the first quarter, what trend then unfolds in second quarter when you’re comping the comp, so to speak, from a macro perspective. I think that’s all in front of all of us as retailers. Do we have initiatives going on in the business to try to buck the trend? Absolutely, we do. As Martin mentioned, again, our core focus on being best at bras, a relook in terms of how do we make sure we’re getting the appropriate amount of traction and growth in the panty business.
So intimates in total, which is about a little over 50% of our business, that’s our core. That’s our best at, how do we continue to grow market share. From a beauty perspective, clearly, we continue to launch new fragrances, and all they really do is go to the top of the chart, so to speak. So we feel very good about the Beauty business and continued newness and refresh in that business and growing it as a percent of the mix in the store. We talked about at the Investor Day, starting to deemphasize a little bit some of the apparel parts of our business again, focusing more into core intimates, core beauty and growing the things that are working the best for us. I think additionally, I want to underline again the international growth in the first three quarters of 2023 as the world is starting to open back up again, we’re seeing very strong performance there.
We can see a pipeline of both country growth, store growth, digital growth internationally for the foreseeable future out through 2023, 2024. So we feel very good about the international part of the business. New business development. Greg and his team have done a great job starting to grow our Amazon business. We think that’s an opportunity going forward in the Store of the Future. I could keep going down the list of initiatives that we talked about at Investor Day, but that was only six weeks ago. All of those are still in place. All of those are still on track, and we feel very good about those.
