Jerome Griffith
Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital
Thanks, Jim. While this is a highly unprecedented environment, we believe there is opportunity for us to emerge stronger on the other side of this crisis. Despite focusing on and responding to the crisis, we continue to make progress in building on our key strategies. The economic challenges and uncertainties we are seeing today are only accelerating the secular changes that have been evolving across the retail landscape over the past 10 years. The four core strategies we established a few years ago remain true today, and we will continue to be guided by them. These include getting the product right; being a digitally driven company; implementing a unit channel distribution strategy; and continue enhancing our infrastructure and process. With respect to our product, we remain focused on owning the water, owning the weather, layers, layers, layers, and we fit everybody. We have seen this strategy continue to resonate with our customers, which has only further accelerated in this environment. We made meaningful enhancements to our product offering over the past few years by improving our mix, quality and styles to more closely reflect our customer. We are also increasingly leveraging our data capabilities to define our product offering and capture the shifting customer trends. An example of this is our casual comfort offering, which we have been building upon over the past few seasons. We will continue to emphasize our casual comfort aesthetic in our fall assortment, which we believe will resonate as we expect people to continue to work from home. Within digital, data remains an important cornerstone in informing our decisions. We are expanding our comprehensive database to build out our consumer insight capabilities, which we are leveraging across our organization. Our mobile experience remains a priority. We know that we need to be where the customer is shopping. We have seen the customer shifting their shopping preferences to this channel over the past few years. We are continuing to upgrade our mobile experience by increasing the speed of navigation, checkout and payment options, among others. While we are seeing a higher mix of online shopping to PCs, which we attribute to work-from-home policies, we expect mobile to remain the preferred shopping channel longer term. We remained focused on improving and refining our approach to our customer file. As our customer database grows, we are able to improve our algorithms to enhance our predictive capabilities. We use these insights to drive repeat purchases from our existing and new customers. As I mentioned earlier, our new customer file increased in April and we will continue to leverage our data to identify and pursue opportunities to expand our reach. At the same time, we remain committed to loving our current customer by providing the product quality and value they desire. In terms of our marketing spend, we are maintaining our flexibility to better align with the current soft consumer environment. We have significant variability in our digital spend and our catalog, albeit to a lesser extent. This flexibility has allowed us to take advantage of select opportunities, particularly on the digital side. We also continue to benefit from our strategies in the online searches and media initiatives. During the quarter, we launched our new marketing campaign, Let's Get Comfy, which highlights our comfort-driven offerings. This was a big initiative for us this spring, and we will accelerate this messaging as we leverage social media channels in order to make the Lands' End brands synonymous with comfort. We will carry this messaging into fall and holiday. With respect to our promotional and markdown strategy, we are committed to maintaining a disciplined approach. However, we have the ability to mitigate clearance markdowns, with half of our current spring/summer inventory comprised of basic styles. We are continuing to test and learn from our AI, where we have already seen more effective and profitable promotional and markdown cadences. In March, we implemented a number of tests to better understand customer behavior in this environment. We attribute the growth in U.S. e-commerce for April, partially to the application of learnings from these tests. As we continue to test and learn, we will improve our database, which will enhance our understanding of customer motivations. In light of the Lands' End team's demonstrated ability to listen to the customer react as they embraced let's get comfy and a stable strong converting website, I am pleased to announce the creation of the Lands' End marketplace. As a digital platform, Lands' End plans to open up our website to third-party sellers and brands who have a product offering, which is in line with exactly what our customer tells us they love, comfy. We are in the process of on-boarding several third-party sellers with an aim to add approximately a dozen in time for holiday peak. This July landsend.com will celebrate its 25th anniversary. We were innovators in the e-commerce space in 1995. And in 2020, we are pleased to push into this next era of digital innovation. Our uni-channel distribution strategy remains more important than ever as we look to serve our customer, wherever, whenever and however they want to shop our brand. We have been continuing to improve our shopping experience in both digital and physical channels. Our brick-and-mortar stores are just beginning to reopen and we believe stores will remain a component of the customer's apparel shopping experience longer term. We view these locations as extensions of our e-commerce business, as well as longer-term drivers of growth. These stores allow us to provide convenience and personalized service to our customers. We opened one store in February and we'll open five additional stores this year. We have paused further store openings for the foreseeable future. As we look at our long-term plans, we will monitor customer buying behavior to determine our retail expansion strategy. Beyond our own channels, we are constantly looking for ways to increase our customer reach through marketplaces, strategic collaborations and partnerships. We have been pleased with our distribution at Amazon where over 75% of purchases have been driven by either new or lapsed customers. We're excited about our fall launch at Kohl's where we will provide our full offering on Kohls.com and a limited seasonal assortment in 150 of its stores. Given that the Kohl's customer shares many similar demographic features as our customer, we have an opportunity to expand our reach. We're also continuing to explore licensing in select categories, such as footwear and men's suiting where we see benefits through a partnership. We also recently introduced swimwear collaboration with Reese Witherspoon's apparel brand Draper James and are pleased with how those products have been performing. We will continue to explore similar collaborations, which we see as compelling opportunities to drive incremental growth and brand awareness. These initiatives remain in early stages but they provide new and exciting opportunities for us to better leverage our iconic American brand heritage, as well as our production capabilities as we build growth longer term. We will continue to update you with our progress as it evolves. Lastly, turning now to our business process and infrastructure. We remain committed to driving profitable top line growth and leveraging our SG&A expense over the long-term. While 2020 will likely be a financial step back for our company, we know that the core strategies we have focused on and instilled in our company over the past few years will leave us better positioned longer term. The consumer landscape has drastically shifted and we expect many of these changes will remain once the crisis has passed. Looking at our long-term growth outlook. Heading into 2020, we were on track to achieve our 2022 targets based on the strength of our performance. While we remain highly confident in our ability to meet these targets given the challenges presented by COVID-19, we now expect these objectives will take longer to achieve than we initially planned. With our resilient e-commerce business and casual and value-oriented product assortments combined with our lean operating structure and liquidity, we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the opportunities ahead. While we expect the environment to remain difficult, we are excited about the future of Lands' End. With that, we'll open it up to questions.