Dave Powers
Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead with your question
Thank you, Angel. As Angel said, we continue to execute on our strategies and had a successful quarter with positive growth coming from all brands and channels. Our success in evolving the UGG brand's spring line and weather collection as well as growing contribution from Teva, Sanuk and HOKA has made the fourth quarter increasingly important for the company. Beginning with our DTC performance, total DTC sales increased 14%, driven by a 5% comp increase, our 10th consecutive quarter of positive comps and solid contributions from the stores that we opened in the last year. Our DTC gains are again driven by our e-commerce channel, which increased 27% on a comparable basis. Store comps improve versus third quarter trends but nevertheless were down mid-single digits due to decreased traffic and lower AUR, partially offset by higher conversion. As a final reminder, beginning in fiscal 2016, we will no longer breakout our store and e-commerce comp performance and instead we will only report on a combined DTC comp as we believe this is the best way to evaluate the health of the channel, now that stores and digital are so intertwined. I am now going to review UGG performance by region, with color on each of the major channel drivers. Starting with North America, DTC comps were roughly flat compared to the same period last year. The comp was helped by continued growth coming from e-commerce and offset primarily by declines in sales at our tourist flagship driven locations. We continue to see strong U.S. dollar impacting international tourist traffic to our Hawaii, Las Vegas and New York stores. These stores collectively represent a disproportionate dollar amount of both our North American and global comp base, so their underperformance has a significant effect on our comp figure. The UGG brand's domestic wholesale business increased low single digits, fueled by sales of spring season collections and winter weather boots. We saw success in our spring sales with our key partners who invested this year more heavily in traditional spring products. Demand for weather product was also very strong coming out of holiday. In order to best capitalize on this in-season opportunity, we increased our use of air freight to avoid the delays caused by the West Coast port slowdown. Now to EMEA. UGG delivered a strong quarter across the board with growth in both our DTC and wholesale channels. DTC comps increased high teens driven by e-commerce sales and a positive store comp. Our new leadership and digital marketing efforts in the region have led to improved performance in our stores and e-commerce businesses. Our success is also due to a sharper focus on developing compelling seasonal spring product especially for the DTC channel. Our decision to convert our German distributor to a subsidiary benefited our wholesale results and has proven very timely as we see a lot of opportunity to grow the UGG brand across all channels in this large and important market. Turning to Asia-Pacific, which was our fastest-growing region during the fourth quarter. DTC comps increase low double digits driven by strong e-commerce and store gains in Japan. Our teams continue to execute against our marketplace strategy in Japan with our men's business being particularly strong. Our success in men's was driven this past quarter by our men's Treadlite collection, which was a big part of our spring marketing campaign. In China, the team is making progress working through the merchandising and allocation issues that impacted the third quarter and the DTC team here in California are continuing to provide additional support as we build up our regional team in Shanghai. We are confident that the adjustments we have made to the product offering and our allocation of merchandising planning will lead to improved performance in our company-owned stores this fall. With regards to our expansion strategy in China, the current plan is to shift more heavily towards partner operated doors. At the end of fiscal 2015, there were 23 partner operated UGG stores in China, which included the seven own stores that were transferred during the year. For fiscal 2016, we expect the number of partner doors to roughly double, mostly through new store openings, but will likely include a few more company-owned transfers. For our own stores, we are temporary slowing the number of new store openings in most of our regions as well for fiscal 2016. The current plan is to open 16 net new stores globally compared to the 30 new stores opened in fiscal 2015. Of the 16, nine are outlets and seven are concept, with all of the concepts planned for the Asia-Pacific region, mostly in Japan, where the brand is performing extremely well. This year, we are focusing more of our investments on technology to drive increased consumer engagement. We are confident this strategy will help fuel growth going forward and maintain our healthy DTC operating margin. Moving over to UGG. For this year's backlog, we were strategically focused on quality and diversity when pre-booking fall. As we outlined in our Q3 call in January, many of our wholesale customers sold out of their non-classic inventory midseason, which lead to missed replenishment opportunities during the holidays. When planning for this upcoming season, we wanted to ensure that our retail partners were better positioned to capitalize on consumer demand. We are pleased to share that based on the strength of our fall and holiday 2015 line, we successfully shifted our women's core classics business from roughly 33% of UGG revenue to under 25% with growth coming from specialty classics, weather, casual boots, slippers and other categories. With this in mind, I am pleased with our results which show global UGG backlog at March 31 up slightly in constant currency with domestic orders up mid-single-digits, offset primarily by a decline in Europe where our distributors' buying power has been reduced due to the strong U.S. dollar. Total company backlog was up low single digits in constant currency. Given the change in the makeup of the UGG brand's fall order book, it's helpful to understand why the makeup of this year's order book is of greater confidence than the outlook for our wholesale business in fiscal 2016 and how the shift will impact our business going forward. Since retailers have pre-booked fewer classics in the past, we now have the ability to use our classic inventory to chase demand in-season. This strategic shift in the makeup has also reduced the risk of cancellations since classics tend to have a higher cancellation rate than our other collections due to their sales sensitivity to cold weather. Our sales team has done an excellent job of working with our wholesalers and we are excited about how this shift positions the UGG brand long-term in line with our new marketing emphasis on product launches. Now to the performance of our other brands. The repositioning Teva to be more relevant to women and to attack the casual and sports sandals categories is paying dividends. Teva continues to generate strong consumer enthusiasm with its originals collection and originals derivatives, which are opening up new distribution and specialty accounts in family footwear chains. These collections, including the newly introduced Flatform Original Sandal and our strategic collaborations have generated significant buzz in the marketplace and are helping us expand our presence within existing partners such as Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters. The same is true in our international markets where the refreshed products, along with concentrated marketing efforts are driving growth and expansion into lifestyle retailers in EMEA and APAC. Moving to Sanuk. Consistent with our strategy, the brand has officially expanded beyond core surf distribution into key wholesale accounts like Journeys and Tilly's as well as all doors at Nordstrom. This has allowed Sanuk to reach a wider female driven audience. As a result, the Sanuk business is now more balanced with 50% of its sales coming from women. Demand for the brand's new or non-core offering has grown significantly, led by the women's Yoga Sandal collection, which is selling through a double-digit percentage rate on a weekly basis this spring. On the men's side, our efforts to gain share in the casual shoes category are bearing fruit. The Boulevard collection, the brand's first casual shoe offering has quickly become the second best-selling men's collection on Sanuk.com behind only the brand's iconic Sidewalk Surfer collection. The brand's expanded distribution, strong digital trends as well as a more robust product offering that now includes casual shoes, position the brand well to compete in the large casual sandal and shoe market against key players such as TOMS and Havaianas. Now to HOKA which is having great top line success and recently exceeded $50 million in sales in fiscal 2015. This is a remarkable achievement for a brand that has only been in the market for a few years and operates in the highly competitive running industry. HOKA's share of neutral cushioning space in the specialty and running channel is now larger than several well-known brands like New Balance and Adidas. What's also remarkable about HOKA's rapid growth is the fact that until recently distribution was limited to the specialty running channel, which is highly fragmented and made up of primarily independent stores and small regional chains. HOKA recently began initial expansion into more mainstream running and sporting goods retailers like Sports Authority and Finish Line, which opens up the brand to a much wider audience. Product innovation continues to be the key growth driver and this year, HOKA will release updates to award-winning styles such as the Clifton and the Bondi, while also expanding into new footwear categories including hiking, where we believe the brand's oversize outsole will provide to be an attractive and differentiating feature at retail. HOKA is now a credible and meaningful player in the running community with strong acceptance by female runners. This acceptance and expansion beyond ultra running gives us confidence in our aggressive growth plans for the brand. As you have just heard, each of our brands is starting the new fiscal year with solid momentum driven by a combination of compelling new products and select new points of distribution. We are confident that we have the right teams, plans and processes in place to capitalize on the many opportunities we believe lie ahead. Looking forward, I want to address the opportunity that I see ahead of us in my new role. My focus will be on leveraging the strength of our Deckers brand portfolio to drive sustainable growth and profitability, create synergy across the organization and continue to evolve our omni-channel capabilities and DTC operations. We will prioritize consumer engagement and digital marketing capabilities for all of our brands. We will leverage the authenticity and strength of our emerging brands to attack meaningful categories globally, create new distribution opportunities and improve overall operating margin. Simultaneously, we will continue to build on the global lifestyle offering of our flagship of UGG brand to drive continued growth across all channels and regions with a strong focus on the evolution of our classics category and the expansion of casual and winter boots as well as men's and loungewear. Finally, I want to announce that we recently acquired the Koolaburra brand, a sheepskin and wool based footwear brand with current product silhouettes that mimic the UGG classic and certain derivatives. We plan to quickly reposition Koolaburra over the next 12 months to enter the mid-tier market. This is a highly strategic acquisition for us that will allow us to compete in this market while maintaining the premium positioning of our UGG brand. We plan to leverage our design and development expertise, as well as our key account relationships to bring Koolaburra to market. We are very excited about this new addition to our brand portfolio and its potential to expand our addressable market. The current health of all our brands, the strength of our franchise styles, distribution expansion opportunities and the evolution of our DTC model gives me great confidence in our ability to drive healthy growth and profit for FY 2016 and beyond. With that, I will now turn the call over to Tom George.