Lands' End, Inc. (LE) Q2 2027 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Hello, and welcome, everyone, joining today's Lands' End Second Quarter Fiscal 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]. Please note, this call is being recorded. We are standing by if you should need any assistance. It is now my pleasure to turn the meeting over to Tom Altholz. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us for a discussion of our second quarter of fiscal 2026 results, which we released this morning and can be found on our website, landsend.com. I'm Tom Altholz, Lands' End's Senior Director of Financial Planning and Analysis. And I'm pleased to join you today with Charlie Cole, our Chief Executive Officer; and Bernie McCracken, our Chief Financial Officer. After the prepared remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Please also note the information we're about to discuss includes forward-looking statements. Such statements involve risks and uncertainties. The company's actual results could differ materially from those discussed on this call. Factors that could contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, those items noted and included in the company's SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. The forward-looking information that is provided by the company on this call represents the company's outlook as of today, and we do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements made by us. Subsequent events and developments may cause the company's outlook to change. During this call, we will be referring to non-GAAP measures. These non-GAAP measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. A reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release issued earlier today, a copy of which is posted in the Investor Relations section of our website at landsend.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Charlie.

Thank you, Tom, and good morning, everyone. I'm honored to be joining you for my first earnings call as CEO of Lands' End. I have spent my career leading digital and e-commerce companies through customer engagement and brand transformations, and I'm excited to be utilizing that experience to help unlock the next phase of growth for this iconic American brand. As you know, I joined the company on July 13, and I spent the past several weeks getting to know the company. Since then, I've been meeting with teams across the company, reviewing the business and listening to customers to ensure a strong foundation to evaluate and execute on the right opportunities ahead. What I found reinforces my confidence in the strength of this brand, loyalty of our customer base and a strong culture that remains a genuine competitive advantage. It's clear to me that the opportunity is significant, and we have strong strategic direction. The work now is ensuring the infrastructure is in place to support it. Put simply, Lands' End is a great business with tremendous opportunity ahead. With that, let me take you through the highlights of the quarter. Across the business, our teams made deliberate decisions on marketing spend, on customer acquisition and on inventory, which we believe position us well for the back half of the year. The product portfolio had clear bright spots this quarter, continuing to leverage product solutions through our key franchises. Women's and men's apparel, especially knits, had a good quarter overall, and bags performance, led by our iconic 5-pocket tote, was a meaningful driver of growth and new customer acquisition. Our swim business continued to execute on owning the weather with high single-digit revenue growth in the U.S. e-commerce business in the quarter. The areas generating real momentum are the ones I'm most energized about. For example, totes remain one of our strongest new-to-brand acquisition tools, and value-added services like embroidery and personalization make the economics even more attractive. Our U.S. new-to-file customer count grew double digits, largely driven by totes and swim, demonstrating our continued ability to use accessories to reach new demographics. Sleep is a category we're excited to develop year-round, and early indicators are positive. Initial reads on outerwear and Christmas stockings are also encouraging, give us good initial visibility into Q3 and Q4. Beyond the product, our marketing activity in Q2 generated some real highlights. Our collaborations with T&T and Wawa and our presence in Nantucket each put Lands' End in front of new and younger audiences in a way that felt authentic to who we are, driving real engagement across social platforms and building the kind of brand equity that compounds over time, not just media conversion. We are especially pleased with our Wawa collaboration, where our iconic tote to over 2.6 billion impressions and more importantly, sold out in hours. These types of activations are driving a step change in our social media following. Of note, traffic across our social channels, including Instagram, increased over 30% year-over-year. While it is early in my tenure, I already see a meaningful opportunity to strengthen how we reach, engage and convert customers. We have a strong data foundation and a loyal core customer base. The opportunity is to use that foundation more effectively, including through more personalized marketing, better customer targeting and greater efficiency at acquisition. We will pursue that work deliberately with the core Lands' End customer at the center of our strategy. Turning to inventory, our inventory levels in the second quarter were higher than the prior year due to tariff uncertainty last year. Current year inventory is more representative of pre-2025 levels and is within our planned parameters, which include increases due to continued tariff headwinds and challenges processing value-added service orders with our new warehouse management system. Our U.S. e-commerce business increased 9% compared to Q2 2025, reflecting the recovery with the rollout of our new warehouse management system across our distribution centers in the first quarter. That issue has been addressed in our core U.S. e-commerce business, and we caught up with shipments by the end of the quarter. In our third-party marketplace business, the standout was Nordstrom. The anniversary sale was a strong moment for the brand, and our franchise categories, outerwear and Wanderweight in particular, continue to resonate in that channel. Across our marketplaces, we continue to pursue a disciplined strategy that emphasizes quality and higher-margin sales over volume. In our Europe business, we made several deliberate pivots, and the early results are encouraging. Revenue finished essentially flat, but our product margin performance was strong, reflecting the strategic choice to leverage key franchises to build the business for long-term success. This, paired with our successful efforts to reach new customers at lower cost and through more deliberately differentiated storytelling in our markets, give us confidence in the path ahead for our Europe business. In addition to the improvement in profitability this quarter, Amazon Germany went live in August, and we are excited to leverage our global experience on Amazon with an entirely new customer. Turning to Lands' End Outfitters, our B2B business. Underlying demand was solid in the quarter, though revenue performance does not fully reflect that. Challenges in our value-added services related to our new warehouse management system and concentrated in B2B customers carried into Q2, which was not anticipated and are reflected in our results. Revenue increased approximately 4% year-over-year with strength in national accounts, partially offset by warehouse management system challenges that impacted the timing of school uniform shipments. Within national accounts, the story is positive with the Enterprise segment up year-to-date by more than 15% versus last year, led by growth in our airline accounts. We entered a new multiyear partnership with Delta Airlines in the second quarter of fiscal 2025, and employee reception to the program was overwhelmingly positive. Today, Delta is in the wear testing phase of its distinctly Delta uniform collection with more than 1,400 frontline employees participating across the system. Feedback and insights from the wear test will be incorporated into final product refinements ahead of the planned second half 2027 rollout. Our school uniform business was impacted by challenges within our new warehouse management system related to processing value-added service products. As a result, shipments were delayed and backlog levels were significantly higher than the prior year, reducing revenue recognition during the quarter. Improving operations at Lands' End Outfitters is a priority. We have and will continue to take action, including working to increase output capacity, improve efficiency in our production process and prioritize shipment of orders to get ahead of customer timing dynamics. We continue to be encouraged by the early progress of our intellectual property joint venture with WHP Global. As previously disclosed, the JV amended several significant licensing agreements that are expected to generate more than $150 million of long-term guaranteed royalty value, reinforcing our confidence in the long-term growth opportunities created by the partnership. I'll now turn it over to Bernie to discuss our second quarter financial performance in more detail.

Thank you, Charlie. For the second quarter of 2026, total revenue was $302 million, an increase of 3% compared to the second quarter of last year. Our U.S. e-commerce business saw a sales increase of 9% compared to the second quarter of 2025. As Charlie discussed, the order backlog from the new warehouse management system challenges in the first quarter benefited Q2 and positively impacted results. We're confident that the warehouse management system issue has been addressed in our core U.S. e-commerce business. Our third-party marketplace business decreased approximately 20% as we continue to prioritize profitable high-quality sales and brand integrity over lower-margin promotional volume. While we saw a decline in revenue, our like-for-like gross margin compared to last year improved by over 500 basis points year-over-year, reflecting the benefits of our disciplined strategy by individual marketplace. Sales from Lands' End Outfitters increased 4% from the second quarter of 2025. The increase was driven by our enterprise accounts, which more than offset the impact of the warehouse management system challenges in our school uniform business processing value-added service products. Sales in Europe increased 1% year-over-year, primarily driven by a strategic shift to a franchise-first assortment that simplified the business and drove improved product margins. Gross profit increased by $14 million or 10% compared to last year. Gross margin in the second quarter was 52%, an approximately 320 basis point improvement from the second quarter of 2025. The gross margin increase was primarily driven by the IEEPA tariff refund, partially offset by the new royalty structure associated with the JV and increased costs associated with our new warehouse management system. SG&A expenses increased by $6 million year-over-year. As a percentage of net revenue, SG&A increased by approximately 80 basis points, primarily driven by investment in digital marketing and operational inefficiencies from the temporary disruption of the new warehouse management system. For the second quarter, we reported adjusted net income of $2.7 million or $0.09 per share. We delivered adjusted EBITDA of $11 million in the second quarter, representing a year-over-year decrease of $4 million. The receipt of IEEPA tariff refunds was offset by the new royalty structure associated with the JV and the challenges in our new warehouse management system, processing value-added service products for school uniforms. Moving to our balance sheet. Inventories at the end of the second quarter were $342 million, up 13% compared to last year. Inventory levels increased largely due to the intentionally lean inventory position we held a year ago amid tariff uncertainty. Inventory is more aligned with typical norms and our planned levels, including the impact of continued tariff headwinds. We remain confident in our holiday assortment and expect inventory to remain within typical levels. Turning to our debt. We ended the second quarter with $60 million in ABL borrowings compared to $35 million last year. As discussed previously, we used the majority of the $300 million in cash proceeds from the WHP Global transaction to fully repay our term loan, leaving us with enhanced liquidity and significantly reduced interest payments. The remainder of the transaction consideration was used for transaction-related corporate expenses and taxes. As a reminder, in conjunction with the April 1 closing of the WHP Global transaction, our Board authorized the repurchase of up to $100 million of common stock through March 31, 2029. During the second quarter, we repurchased approximately 900,000 shares for approximately $11 million, bringing the remaining balance of the authorization to $89 million as of the end of the quarter. Now moving to guidance. Our guidance reflects the impacts of tariffs at current implemented rates, and we are continuing to execute mitigation measures to manage tariff headwinds for the remainder of fiscal 2026. For the third quarter of 2026, we expect net revenue of $300 million to $330 million, adjusted net income of $2 million to $6 million and adjusted diluted earnings per share of $0.07 to $0.20; adjusted EBITDA in the range of $14 million to $18 million. For fiscal 2026, we now expect net revenue of $1.3 billion to $1.35 billion, adjusted net income of $13 million to $21 million and adjusted diluted earnings per share of $0.44 to $0.72. Adjusted EBITDA in the range of $62 million to $70 million. Full year guidance incorporates approximately $40 million in capital expenditures. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Charlie.

Thank you, Bernie. I want to close by saying how encouraged I am by what I am seeing across this business. The brand has tremendous strength, and we believe the opportunities to unlock its full potential are clear. I also want to take a moment to welcome Jimmy Ferolo, who recently joined us as Chief Digital and Technology Officer. Jimmy brings a proven track record of driving digital transformation and customer-centric innovation across leading consumer brands, most recently at Solairus Aviation and prior to that at Singer and Maui Jim. His deep expertise in scaling e-commerce capabilities and elevating the customer experience will be instrumental as we move into the next chapter of growth for Lands' End. Martin Christopher, our former Chief Technology Officer, now reports to Jimmy, bringing strong continuity to our technological transformation. Jimmy's arrival is well timed. The focus right now is on tactical excellence to ensure we have the right infrastructure, technology and customer acquisition capabilities in place heading into the peak holiday selling season. That includes meeting customer expectations on shipping and fulfillment and deepening personalization across our offerings. That work connects to something underappreciated about this business. Through decades of catalog and e-commerce engagement, we have built a foundation of owned customer data that few retailers can match. As we apply AI-powered capabilities across merchandising, marketing and customer retention, proprietary data combined with AI-enabled execution becomes a competitive advantage that grows more valuable over time. I look forward to meeting many of you in the months ahead. What I can tell you is that my conviction at Lands' End and in this team is only growing. With that, we look forward to your questions.

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Dana Telsey with Telsey Group.

Welcome, Charlie. Charlie, in your purview, as you think about the opportunities for Lands' End going forward and given your background, how do you see the enhanced execution, the involvement in technology, what happens with e-commerce? How does it fit the different categories, whether it's the e-commerce, international, outfitters, third party and obviously, the new relationship with WHP. What's your North Star going forward? And then I have a quick question on just the here and now.

Dana, thank you so much for the welcome. I really appreciate that, and thank you for the question. So one of the -- this question is so far reaching because it involves a lot of buzzwords, so I'm going to try to decouple them. My long-term vision for Lands' End is we are a modern AI engine that drives almost our entire customer experience. And so I want to unpack that a little bit. A modern AI engine can simultaneously evaluate so many things. And so I'll start with focusing on the e-commerce side of things, and I'll get into Lands' End Outfitters in Europe as well. It can evaluate a customer's purchase history, their browsing behavior, the weather, the geography, the search patterns, inventory availability, full price sell-through targets, category affinity, and it could evaluate all these things at the same time. And so if you think about that just processing power and where you want to put that, you start with e-commerce front end CRM messaging, marketing targeting, including catalog segmentation and creative personalization. And so it's not an exaggeration, Dana, to say that I want an AI engine that sits at the center of our customer experience and enables an experience that our customers have really never seen before. And if you wanted pragmatic examples, if somebody who has shopped at Lands' End has exclusively shopped outerwear, they should have a very different experience than someone who's exclusively shopped swim. That doesn't mean we don't show back and forth, but it does mean we give them a personalized experience to optimize not only conversion but lifetime value and frankly, Net Promoter Score as well. That's equally applicable to Europe. With Europe, we have to be aware of the realities of sort of the different data regulations, and so we'd be thoughtful of that as well. And then with Lands' End Outfitters, it's actually the same answer. It's just with a different process because you think about our school business, that is fairly rhythmic. And so time becomes a very obvious kind of input where we have to reach out to customers at the right time with the right message based on their school schedule. And so that's a slight personalization that would allow us to give a much better experience. But it's not an exaggeration, Dana, to say, from a technology perspective, we are going to build an AI infrastructure that gives us an e-commerce platform that will rival the best in the industry, and that's the core goal. And so I'm happy to answer your follow-up question as well.

Great. The warehouse management system, I think, which the second quarter also had some impacts. Is that complete now? And is there anything on the shaping of third and fourth quarter and how you're seeing it, whether from a margin perspective or a top line perspective, how it differs this year from last year?

On the warehouse management system topic, we are now running at normal operations. And so it's caught up -- we are now caught up on the throughput. We are still working through a backlog, but operations are proceeding as normal at the same or higher levels than before the warehouse management system issues. It is also worth noting that there is more efficiency to unlock where we can actually put other infrastructure in place, but that will not happen until next year. But there is more efficiencies that will be unlocked as we can support the WMS with other software solutions as well. As it pertains to Q3 and Q4, we don't anticipate any effect on our guidance for the WMS with the exception of the catch-up that will come out of the Lands' End Outfitters division.

Got it. And then just the third quarter guide, anything to unpack there on the margin side in fourth quarter and remainder of expectations for tariffs?

Yes. Dana, our guidance reflects the current levels of tariffs that are in place. And the rest of the -- there isn't really any other year-on-year differences that we'll be dealing with. We feel very good about the guidance we gave and the expectations that we will hit that.

Our next question comes from Eric Beder with SCC Research.

Just a few quick questions. Let's talk about international here. What should we be thinking about? I know prior, Europe was a kind of a -- a little bit more fashion forward, a little more of a driver of trend. Is that still how you look at that? And how does that fit in terms of the JV and the other international opportunities?

For international, Eric, our focus is predominantly on our European e-commerce business. And the focus there has been to really -- our Q2 focus was on margin above everything else. And so that's driving a less promotional business, which you could qualify as a bit more fashion forward and a bit more trend focused. We actually feel really good about where our European business is. And there is some slight nuance to the trends, obviously, even within the continent between Germany, the U.K., et cetera. But the Lands' End value proposition is the same, frankly, internationally, where we were fortunate enough in June of 2026 to be awarded with the highest rating from Forbes and their Best Brands for Value report. I directly think that spans borders, where we're going to deliver value and durability and kind of leverage our unique heritage in a way, they will have international appeal. There will be slight nuances from a merchandising perspective, trends such as weather is going to affect what people buy depending on where they live. And so we're certainly not naive to that. But I believe that the Lands' End brand should have international appeal and ultimately have the same foundation regardless of where it is in the world. And that will be true also by channel, whether it's direct e-commerce, whether it's with our JV with WHP, whether it's with Amazon or other partners. So we're going to do everything we can to make sure the Lands' End brand is ubiquitous regardless of where it is in the world.

And then, Eric, just to add on a little bit, and you'll notice this in our comments in the script, the Europe business, while we still consider it to be fashion forward and to drive some trends, we have pulled it back a little and have got them to be more into our franchises, which is driving a higher profitability.

Okay. Let's talk about the WHP piece a little bit. When do you believe -- okay, so where are we in terms of adding new licenses? And when do you believe that those licenses will start to kick in and help drive the joint venture overall profitability, which you share in?

Yes. Eric, our guidance reflects the royalties and licensing royalties that we will receive for the remainder of this year. As you know, any kind of licensing agreement has a long 10 years before it will benefit us going forward. There's product that needs to be made and outlets to be garnered. So right now, the basics of our guidance reflects the licenses that we had in place and a few of the new smaller licenses that we had signed prior to WHP and that they have taken on into the next level.

You mentioned here about the potential next year for new software and some of the potential positive -- some of the potential rollouts, I think potential efficiencies you get from that. How big should we think of that as an opportunity in '27 and going forward?

Thanks, Eric, for all your questions. Predominantly, it's going to be infrastructure across the warehouse, and you would see the opportunity basically in service levels, more than anything else. So I wouldn't expect it to have any direct input to our guidance. But in a similar fashion to my answer to Dana on our technological infrastructure, really, it's around enabling a customer experience that will exceed expectations. So in a lot of ways, the benefits will be focused more from a lifetime value perspective, but as opposed to direct guidance.

Our next question comes from Michael Kupinski with NOBLE Capital Markets.

And Charlie, welcome to Lands' End. The company appears to -- the quarter indicated that you have some favorable underlying revenue trends, and I kind of want to drill down on that a little bit. The Outfitters grew like 4.4% despite continued school uniform processing challenges. And I was just wondering, can you give us some color on how the order book is trending now? And what growth rate do you believe the business can sustain once operations are like fully normalized?

Michael, thank you for the warm welcome. The Outfitters business also had a real bright spot with enterprise clients as well, which we mentioned. And so the growth rate is also already aligned in our guidance, but we're remarkably bullish on that business. And I would also say, as I referenced when I responded to Dana, there is also increased opportunity by improving their customer experience through that same commerce focus. So while we are very bullish on our guidance, we're equally bullish on to improve the customer experience from a front-end perspective, from a messaging perspective and from a marketing perspective. I'm actually visiting with some Outfitters' clients next week, including Delta and American Airlines. So I'm excited to kind of get deeper involved in that business.

Got you. And the -- in Q2, the U.S. commerce revenue increased 9%. And I think part of that was a carryover from the Q1 distribution disruption. What would have been the underlying e-commerce growth, excluding that catch-up benefit?

The U.S. business on a year-to-date basis since the carryover was completed through the second quarter is flat for the year or flattish.

Okay. And obviously, inventory is up a little bit, and it seems like you're saying that it's a little bit more normalized. Can you talk about specific inventory that you're leaning into the quarter as you kind of go into the holiday season here?

Yes, Michael, I think one of the keys, right, is comparing year-on-year is that last year, we were dealing with a lot of uncertainty around tariffs and where and what countries and what products were going to be tariffed at different rates. And so we were very conservative in the types of products that we brought in and where they were being produced. So I think you'll find, especially when we talk about owning the weather, that our outerwear is going to have a broader assortment than it did last year, where that was the place we were probably most conservative and that we really feel we'll be able to leverage that in the back half of the year, especially as the weather gets colder. But as we've talked about over the last couple of years, it's about layering for us, too, that owning the weather isn't just when -- for our heavy down coats, it's about having fleece and sweaters and owning that transition period, too. So we're very excited about this back half.

Thank you. This concludes our Q&A session as well as our conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.