Federica Marchionni
Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital Group. You may begin
Thank you, Mike. The second quarter results were disappointing and the performance is not acceptable. However, we are taking many actions at this time not only to address the current business but also to have a stronger product offering, marketing proposition, go-to-market strategy and operating platform for future periods. Since I joined the company early this year, my objective has been clear, growth, profitability and adaptability. Those will result from a combination of enhancing our core business as well as attracting new consumer and operating in new retail environment. Our priority growth is to maximize our potential with our core customer by increasing the fundamental metrics such as average order value, unit per transaction, traffic and conversion. In pursuit of this goal, we will build capabilities that can be leveraged in new opportunities. We seek to grow and expand into new consumer segment, market and channel and actively look for both in the market as an opportunity to bridge the gap, gain market share and win new consumers. Profitability is an ever-present guiding principle and align with our growth initiative. As I stated at the shareholder meeting in June, I’m very bottom line driven. While our clear objective is to grow, doing so at the expense of profitability is neither desirable nor sustainable from a long term standpoint which brings us to adaptability. To achieve profitable growth, it is inevitable that change needs to be made in order to succeed in today’s practically and highly competitive retail environment. I have been leading a concentrated effort to build on our solid foundation to motivate the teams to achieve greater efficiency and show the way to reach milestone previously deemed unattainable. Always taking great care of our people, empowering employees and making sure the new hires are smoothly integrated into this incredible culture. I’m very proud of the changes initiated in the second quarter. As we look at all changes, we have put them into three major categories to clearly outline the expected outcomes. We will begin with discussion related to the most important topic for any retail company, product followed by the most important asset for our company, the direct segment and the most critical component of our strategy, our brand. Our products are the core of our success. The customer reception for the Spring/Summer collection specifically several key items in our women’s assortments played a key role in our second quarter performance. Therefore, we have initiated a new approach to inject what we were missing in our merchandising offer. To present a more compelling product offer to our consumer, I have worked closely with our design team and hire new designers so that we could impart an higher sensibility on to our ready to wear merchandise for Spring/Summer ’16 makes strength stronger by enforcing our core business for our classy consumer and introducing a more relevant offer to attract a new audience and expand the Lands’ End family. With improved design talent, we will stay in the port of transient style and interpreting market sheets of consumer needs ensuring that our collection is the sweet spot of our consumers’ preference. This will be a constant evolution and one of the key tools to win in our competitive market. In addition, we have filled the critical leadership position of Chief Merchandising Officer as well as the leader of our supply chain to ensure the entire process of the product assortment, product development and manufacturing will deliver the right inventory, the greatest quality in fit and traffic and the best capability to sustain our growth. Not only we were excited with the product impact of this new Lands’ End Associates, we are even more pleased with how successfully they have integrated into the existing structure of Lands’ End in an harmonious classic manner as we believe that our culture is a strong competitive advantage we need to leverage. Our mission is to create the most timely yet timeless product with the best quality and value. Core customers have always been our highest priority and we have made every effort to ensure a continue and growing support through a state to the core collection and are in keeping with the brand DNA. In tandem with the core business, we are seeking to expand our Lands’ End family by ensuring we have relevant product offering for every generation in our target consumer household. We intend to gain their attention through this product expansion with fresh, clean or ecstatic in a new fit. It is important to underline that this fit with [indiscernible] not only is successful among young people, but is the one used internationally by major competitors. These will be a key element to gain a broader market share internationally for future growth. The expansion is set to launch in Spring/Summer ’16. In addition, we have also partnered with experienced professional to design, develop and manufacture a new footwear line that will be launched at the same time. All of these serve as examples of the initiative that we immediately set in motion that are expected to have a material impact on the product offering early next year. The second area of strategic focus relates to improving the overall shopping experience in our direct segment, our largest and most important segment. In the second quarter, we became laying the framework for many changes on our direct platform based with increasingly competitive online landscape from virtually all traditional brick and mortar retailers, we needed to urgently update our web site inside and out. In a relatively short time, we were able to adapt and debut a new modernized online shopping feature, which drew the attention of our new target consumers. We have enhanced this approach to showcase the fall/winter 2015 to the same consumer and expanded the entire website building and elevated high static to the rest of our customer base. Since best-in-class service is key to converting our increased traffic, on August 12, we also upgraded our check-out process by building an express feature to expedite and simplify the shopping experience. Moreover, we’ve redesigned the site index and launched the first e-catalogue in August. Going forward, we are looking to increase the payment option providing gifting with purchase and develop a mobile application. We are looking to build a site architecture, redesign the product page and integrate social media logins onto the website to further drive traffic conversion and ultimately sustained growth. We will also rollout all these initiatives to our subsidiaries and upgrade the international web platform. Hence on a global scale, our online business will continue to serve as a key channel for distribution. We intend to complete all this action by early 2016. In addition to the website upgrade, we made drive on the ERP implementation, redesign the scope of the program, mapped out the implementation and we have selected an industry-leading system integrator to support the implementation. This initiative is directly aimed at providing us with a strong platform on which to grow our existing business and the potential for additional channel of distribution. It also helps to dramatically improve our efficiency in merchandizing, operation, accounting and technology part of our business. And it expect to provide the necessary foundation to fully realize our strategic objective of growth, profitability and adoptability. Lastly, our strategic focus also relates to the Lands' End brand. While there are many industry benchmarks to monitor brand status, we feel that brand awareness is a very critical measurement and we were [indiscernible] with how we score on this metrics. We have begun a marketing and messaging campaign that is intended to improve our brand identity and awareness as well as expect to generate additional revenue. As mentioned, hopefully you have seen our new brand campaign, our new fall catalogue design and enhanced website and digital marketing which were developed over the course of the second quarter. We thought to create a powerful, high-impact advertising campaign that truly sticks to both our core consumers and the new extended audience across major media platform in both print and digital formats. The campaign allow us to strengthen our brand identity as an iconic American brand, develop a stronger [indiscernible] and truly speak to our multigenerational consumer ranging from grandparents to grandchildren. We expect to drive significant increases in total print and digital impression in the third and fourth quarter as well as enhanced customer perception, expand the Lands' End family to include a new audience, drive consumers to the improved website and pave the way for them to view Lands' End through a completely fresh lens. In conjunction with the new media campaign, we also grew our total PR impression, which increased our brand awareness. On social media, we have started a more focused campaign to grow our fall over traditional [ph] initiative including messaging, brand ambassador and product seeding. To emphasize a point made earlier, this new marketing and brand awareness efforts are not expected to increase our overall marketing investment. We will continue to manage our overall marketing spend, looking for opportunities to cut inefficiency and reallocate funds where and if needed. In summary, while the second quarter performance was challenging, we planted the seeds for the future growth and began execution on many important initiatives that set the foundation for later quarter. Thank you for joining our call. We will now open the call for questions.