Jane Elfers
Analyst · D.A. Davidson
Thank you, Anthony, and good morning, everyone. After reviewing Q3 results, I'll provide you with an update on three key strategic areas of focus that support continued market share gains. First, I'll discuss our recently announced Gymboree relaunch plans; next, I'll update the status of our digital transformation; and last, I'll recap how the execution of our strategic initiatives along with our superior product and low-pricing model position us to continue to capture market share in various economic environments despite disruptive industry consolidation and persistent declines in U.S. birth rates. First, Q3 results, our key product categories resonated strongly with mom in the back-to-school season, the second most important shopping period of the year. In fact, we believe we were one of the top destinations for key back-to-school categories this year further solidifying our preeminent position in the U.S. kids specialty apparel market. Our e-commerce business continued its stellar performance delivering 23% growth and representing a record 35% penetration to total sales a 650 basis point increase versus last year. We also saw a return to higher AURs in our stores during Q3 primarily driven by less promotional activity. Driven by a strong back-to-school season, we delivered a positive 0.8% comp in Q3 on top of a positive 9.5% comp in Q3 a year ago despite multiple headwinds including prolonged warmer weather into late October, which negatively impacted sales of colder weather products in key regions across the country. Considering our belief that there were elevated inventory levels at a basket of our key competitors entering the quarter, our Q3 outlook provided on our Q2 conference call, anticipated the high likelihood of increased promotional activity in the kids' apparel space. We also called out a very unfavorable year-on-year weather compare in October as colder weather arrived early in October last year and provided a significant sales benefit in the final month of Q3. However, our outlook didn't anticipate 2019 to be the second warmest September on record followed by prolonged warm weather through the end of October, which hampered demand for our fall product throughout the quarter in our key regional markets. The extended warm temperatures when coupled with inflated competitor inventories entering the quarter resulted in elevated promotions in the kids' apparel space, particularly towards the end of the quarter which had a further adverse impact on our sales and margins. Inventory management continues to be a priority for us, and we exited the quarter with inventories up approximately 3% to last year with seasonal carryover inventory down double-digits and finally, despite the significant headwinds, we were able to deliver EPS results near the upper-end of our guided range. Shifting to the Gymboree integration, on October 15, we formally announced the early 2020 relaunch of the iconic Gymboree brand, which marked the next phase of our exciting journey to bring the coveted brand back to its fiercely loyal customer base. Our team hosted a media event in New York City to support the relaunch and showcase our spring 2020 Gymboree collection. The response to the product was overwhelmingly positive as attendees including bloggers and key influencers gave high freight to the product for capturing the core of what mom loved most about the Gymboree brand during its peak. We encourage you to read the thousands of comments Gymboree moms continue to post on our Gymboree social media sites. The comments reinforce what we have discussed before she remains fiercely loyal to the Gymboree brand and is not inclined to take her dollars elsewhere. Our plan is to reintroduce the Gymboree brand in early 2020, through a meaningfully improved digital experience on gymboree.com, complemented by shop-in-shop locations in over 200 TCP stores in the U.S. and Canada. On many occasions, we have discussed that we have the dream customer, a millennial mom, and you can see it reflected in our quickly evolving omni profile. Approximately 40% of our customer file is comprised of online and omni-channel customers and this group increased approximately 14% in Q3, and now represents nearly 60% of our identifiable U.S. sales as we continue to make significant progress driving more of our customers to join our omni-channel rank and to spend more year-on-year as they make this transition. This is a strong indicator that we have the ability to provide the millennial Gymboree mom with the same type of omni experiences that we are providing to our core TCP millennial customers. And we expect our enhanced offering for Gymboree will be well received at launch. The enhanced, personalized online shopping experience at gymboree.com, will offer a customer-centric and vibrant online experience that the prior owner simply wasn't able or willing to provide. The Gymboree brand did not have a robust loyalty program. And did not have a notable private label credit card initiative, which presents, The Children's Place with a meaningful opportunity when considering, approximately 80% of TCP brand sales, come from our MyPLACE Rewards and our private label credit card loyalty members. Importantly, our loyalty members, spend nearly three times are non-loyalty customers. Additionally, the Gymboree mom will benefit from the children's place, transformational investments, made behind omni-channel, digital fulfillment capabilities. Following a carefully controlled re-launch of the Gymboree brand at retail in early 2020, we will provide additional insight into our future plans to address additional opportunities, for the Gymboree brand. Our real estate team continues to execute on the strategy of opening new TCP locations in select centers, that were highly productive for Gymboree ,with six new TCP locations opened in Q3, that are each forecasted to post annualized sales volumes, well in excess of $1 million. The openings are part of our high-return strategy, to capture the displaced Gymboree market share, with what we believe to be little risk of cannibalizing our existing retail sales or sales of potential wholesale partners. We previously discussed having identified 40 locations that were extremely productive for Gymboree, where TCP does not currently have a presence. These are centers which have no existing Children's Place location to cannibalize. And do not have another TCP location within a large radius. In addition, these centers are largely occupied by other kids retailers, who based on the relative productivity of the center, likely perform extremely well in these locations. We believe the new TCP store sales in these locations will be nearly 100% incremental for TCP, allowing us to pick up share from key competitors, as we bring the Gymboree brand back, to these highly productive centers. In the TCP locations that were collocated in centers, with closed Crazy 8 and Gymboree locations, we comped several hundred basis points better, than in centers with no collocated stores. So we believe we're continuing to gain traction, in securing market share, from the abandoned Crazy 8 and Gymboree customers. So as the customer excitement around the return of Gymboree continues to build into the early 2020 re-launch, we believe, we are very well positioned to capture an outsized portion of the sales left behind by Gymboree. Moving on to digital transformation, continuing to build off the foundational capabilities for personalization, as part of our accelerated $50 million digital transformation investment, we launched the initial test phase of personalization in early May, which was focused on a limited number of identified behavioral segments across five channels of distribution. Building upon the initial results in Q2, we began to expand into additional segments in Q3 extending personalized content to approximately 10% of our customer file. We continue to see encouraging lift in open rates, orders per customer, net revenue and net margin per customer with continued strong migration of store customers to higher spending omni-channel tiers. Our goal is to extend personalized content to approximately 80% of our customer file during the first half of 2020. The impact of digital personalization can be meaningful as we estimate that each point of conversion of our e-commerce traffic represents an incremental $80 million in digital revenue. Shifting to our enhanced omni-channel capabilities. Our store fulfillment capabilities are another meaningful contributor towards the $200 million digital opportunity and they continue to outperform expectations as they drive enhanced options for mom. BOSS and BOPIS continued to outperform expectations with customer online orders picked up in the stores in the mid-teens and attaching at a nearly 20% rate leading to a considerably higher-than-average ticket. In a few weeks, we plan to begin piloting Save the Sale functionality, which will provide our moms with access to inventory from other store locations or the distribution center for products that are not in stock at a specific store location. We'll be able to deliver that product directly to her and capture incremental sales that would have otherwise been lost absent the Save the Sale capability. As discussed our online and omni-channel customers increased by approximately 14% and now represent approximately 40% of our total customers, which is a nearly 600 basis point increase from a year ago. In only a few short years, we have gone from 80% of our customers choosing to shop only in our brick-and-mortar stores to approximately 60% choosing to shop only in our stores. We expect that our online and omni-channel customer penetration will continue to increase as we ramp up our omni-channel capabilities and execute upon our fleet optimization plan to ensure that we're serving our millennial customers preference for the convenience and ease of an online shopping experience. Now I'll address how our cost and pricing model provides us with a valuable competitive advantage. As we continue to mix our product costs lower through continuing to migrate our sourcing activities to lower cost regions of the world, we are able to provide the value price points that we believe millennial moms are looking for as they continue to seek value and apparel purchases to fund their higher spend on experiences. In fact, our AUC for 2020 is projected down low single-digits and importantly that is on top of an AUC decrease in 2019. Over time, we believe that this pricing model has and will continue to allow us to create a meaningful pricing spread to the competitive set, which in turn will allow us to capture a greater share of the estimated $600 million of sales donated each year by poorly positioned competitors. Historically, our cost and pricing advantage has proven to be a benefit in good markets while also positioning us well in difficult economic years as evidenced by our low-single-digit comp growth in the most recent recessionary period. The ability to competitively maintain lower AUCs is especially important in a shrinking children's apparel market driven by approximately 2.2 million fewer births over the last 10 years versus the pre-recessionary period, which represents an average decline of 1.1% a year over the last 10 years. We believe that as the millennials pay down debt marry and purchase homes later than prior generations, growth in the children's apparel space will continue to be realized through market share gains for the foreseeable future. That is why we believe that our ability to provide quality children's apparel at a value price, while also having the capacity and foresight to invest in digital transformation uniquely positions us for continued market share gains. So as the industry continues its consolidation and news of Gymboree's bankruptcy phase in favor of closings from other opposition retailers, our competitive advantages continue to widen providing us the opportunity to capture a greater share of abandoned revenue each year. The revenue and margins driven from share gains support necessary digital investment which further solidifies our strong positioning. And lastly, with respect to current business. Our digital penetration continues to increase and our AURs are strengthening as we focus on disciplined inventory management in a promotional environment. However, due to meaningfully weaker than planned mall traffic quarter-to-date, we are lowering our outlook for Q4. Now, I'll turn it over to Mike.