Operator
Operator
Good day and welcome to this Coach Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to the Global Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications at Coach, Andrea Shaw Resnick. Andrea Shaw Resnick - Global Head, Investor Relations & Corporate Communications: Good morning and thank you for joining us. With me today to discuss our quarterly results are Victor Luis, Coach's Chief Executive Officer; and Jane Nielsen, Coach's CFO. Andre Cohen, President, North America, is also joining us. Before we begin, we must point out that this conference call will involve certain forward-looking statements, including projections for our business in the current or future quarters or fiscal years. These statements are based upon a number of continuing assumptions. Future results may differ materially from our current expectations based upon a number of important factors, including risks and uncertainties such as expected economic trends or our ability to anticipate consumer preferences, control costs, successfully execute our transformation initiatives and growth strategies, or our ability to achieve intended benefits, cost savings and synergies from the Stuart Weitzman acquisition. Please refer to our latest Annual Report on Form 10-K and our other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a complete list of risks and important factors. Please note that historical trends may not be indicative of future performance. Also, certain financial information and metrics that will be discussed today will be presented on a non-GAAP basis, which you may identify by the terms non-GAAP, constant currency, excluding the negative impact of foreign currency, or excluding charges associated with the financing short-term purchase accounting adjustments, contingent payments and integration costs. You may find the corresponding GAAP financial information or metric as well as the related reconciliation on our website, www.coach.com/investors, and then viewing the earnings release posted today. Now, let me outline the speakers and topics for this conference call. Victor Luis will provide an overall summary of our second fiscal quarter 2016 milestones and learnings, and will also discuss our progress on global initiatives. Andre Cohen will discuss our North America business in more detail. Jane Nielsen will follow with details on financial and operational results for the quarter, along with our outlook for the balance of FY 2016. After that, we will hold a question-and-answer session. This Q&A session will end shortly before 9:30 a.m. Victor will then conclude with some brief summary comments. I'd now like to introduce Victor Luis, Coach's CEO. Victor Luis - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Good morning. Thank you, Andrea, and welcome, everyone. As noted in our press release, we are very pleased with our second quarter performance, which was consistent with our expectations and reflects the most significant progress to-date on our transformation plan, despite the difficult retail environment globally. We drove further sequential improvement in our North America bricks and mortar business, led, as expected, by our retail stores, while our outlet store channel also strengthened against the backdrop of lower tourist traffic and a highly promotional environment. Our international businesses posted strong growth on a constant currency basis, highlighted by double-digit increases in Europe and Mainland China as well as sales gains in Japan. Overall, our results continue to give us confidence that the cumulative impact of our actions will result in the return to top-line growth this fiscal year and positive North American comps by our fourth fiscal quarter. Importantly, during the holiday period, we delivered on our plan across businesses and geographies while continuing to successfully execute our brand transformation across the key consumer touch points of product, stores and marketing. Our broader gifting assortment resonated with our customers globally across all price points and in all channels. We continued to transition more of the fleet into our modern luxury concept with a significant increase in remodels prior to holiday, driving results globally and the continued positive comps in the North American retail stores which have been renovated. Finally, our holiday marketing struck a fine balance between fashion and bolder, more relatable gifting messages. We are also excited about Stuart Weitzman's results during the quarter, which exceeded expectations. Boots, in particular, sold well, notably in domestic retail stores and in spite of the unseasonably warm weather. Stuart Weitzman's strong outperformance against the category clearly reflected the brand's strong development of fashionable trend-right product as well as its growing relevance with increasing numbers of consumers globally. We are also excited to see Stuart Weitzman continue to gain traction internationally, notably in Asia where the brand is still nascent but has significant long-term potential. Importantly, we are effectively integrating Stuart Weitzman into Coach, Inc. while continuing to successfully execute the Coach brand transformation. Since acquisition, we've strengthened the Stuart Weitzman team by bringing in new talent. Specifically, we've recruited a new chief merchant while also leveraging Coach leaders and handbag specialists in product development roles and in senior finance and human resources positions. Now, as have been our recent practice, I'd like to share some of the actions we've taken to build momentum across our three key brand pillars of product, stores and marketing, starting with product, where Coach is clearly emerging as a house of modern fashion design. During the second quarter, as in Q1, essentially all of our retail stores' offering, both men's and women's, were Stuart Vevers' designs. Handbags continued to be driven by the Swagger family, with the Nomad Hobo also a key bestseller for the season. Essentials, including the Edie shoulder bag group, the Prairie Satchel and the Turnlock Tote were also great gifts at key price points. And our gift box program resonated globally. In outlet, we continued to increase the offering of Stuart's designs and updates, representing about 90% of the assortment with key new styles, such as Blake launched in late Q1, and the reimagined Phoebe and Christie groups in women's, as well as a strong group of backpacks driving our men's business. Our gift box program, where we distorted investment, also was very successful. In the wake of our first complete runway show in September, our new Coach 1941 collection received significant attention from top tier specialty retailers and luxury department stores. The collection will debut next month in Saks, Nordstrom's, Opening Ceremony, Fred Segal and Jeffrey New York, as well as Colette in Paris, LUISAVIAROMA, Umeda Hankyu in Japan, Galleria West in Seoul and Lane Crawford in Greater China. Of course, it will also be available at select Coach retail flagships globally, with all stores receiving the iconic Saddle Bag, which arrived earlier this month and was the buy-now feature of our September fashion show. We also just presented at London Collection Men's the overwhelmingly positive reviews from both the editorial and retail communities. Naturally, we're thrilled by the attention that Stuart's collections are generating and see it as a clear vote of confidence for our strategic and creative direction. On stores, we're continuing to establish our new Modern Luxury concept stores globally, renovating and opening over 65 during the quarter, including 24 renovations and two new Modern Luxury stores in our directly-operated North American business, taking us to about 250 across all channels worldwide. We remain on target to end the year at 40% of our doors in the new format. Consistent with plan, these renovations have been driving significant inflections from previous trends in comps, which exceeded the balance of the fleet in the vast majority of stores around the world. We've also seen our new retail and outlet Modern Luxury stores meeting or exceeding their targets in aggregate. In North American department stores, we completed six additional case-line conversions, renovated four shop-in-shop locations to Modern Luxury in 2Q, and added four Modern Luxury shops. Finally, we have about 30 shop managers in place today and have seen a significant impact versus balance of chain and expect to hire another 20 by the end of the year. On the marketing front, we remain focused on creating desire for our brands and building emotional connections with consumers globally. During the holiday season, we were decidedly more fun and festive in our marketing approach, including a lighthearted holiday film with the tagline #GiveCoachOrElse, which aired on network television in the U.S., a first for the brand, and globally on our brand websites and social media platforms, driving over 135 million impressions worldwide. And our popular Coach Pups campaign brought smiles to consumers' faces. Looking forward to the first half of calendar 2016, we will begin to celebrate our 75th anniversary, focusing on our distinctive brand proposition. No other American brand in our space can claim the unique combination of heritage and craftsmanship that is our DNA, fused with the modern fashion sensibility of Stuart's vision. Next month, we will debut our Heritage campaign, featuring Coach icons and starting with the recently launched Saddle Bag. The global brand campaign is a key vehicle to communicate our authentic history as America's original house of leather. We're also excited about our Coach Vintage initiative, a highly-coveted collection of four of our most iconic bags that we've reclaimed, masterfully restored, and hand-embellished by artisans, modernizing them for today. The collection has been curated for sale in premium channels worldwide including Colette in Paris and Barneys in New York and Los Angeles. We will also feature installations in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Beijing, as well as a global online auction. You can learn more about Coach Vintage on coach.com, where we have an environment dedicated to several of our 75th anniversary initiatives. In the digital arena, we launched e-commerce in the UK early in the quarter and drove over 0.5 million visits to the site during the period. In the U.S., we continued to gain traction through mobile devices, which represents over half of our online visits. And for holiday, we launched enhancements to coach.com, with personalized e-gifting, where customers sent Coach products as digital gifts. And as we increased our positive brand impressions, we continued to reduce the number of eOS events from prior year, and are now at our planned sustainable cadence of about two events a month or six to seven a quarter. As a result of these efforts, we have seen continued progress with consumers in our quarterly North America brand-tracking survey, fielded in December. Importantly, our overall brand affinities remain strong with consumers. And this quarter, we were particularly pleased to see notable improvement among category drivers in the high quality and unique attributes compared to six months ago, which we believe is a direct reflection of the investments we have put into the make of our product. So, as our plans unfold and we continue to show steady improvement, we are very pleased and extremely proud of all that our team has accomplished during the past three seasons to drive Coach's transformation. The Coach brand is very much on its way to evolving from an accessible luxury handbag and accessories brand to one of the most relevant modern luxury brands in fashion. We're excited to see our vision and direction take hold and we'll continue to update you on these initiatives as we move forward. Turning now to a discussion of category trends, overall, we estimate that the North American premium women's handbag and accessories market was essentially flat in the December quarter, with unit growth still quite positive, offset by lower AURs given the heightened levels of promotional activity. Importantly, against this backdrop, Coach's sales of women's bags and accessories, while still negative, once again improved sequentially in North America. And, of course, as a lifestyle and multi-brand company, we also participate in categories outside of women's bags and accessories. Men's, which represents about 17% of our global net sales, posted strong results in the quarter. We continue to believe it is a growth opportunity for the brand and are still forecasting mid single-digit growth during FY 2016. Over our planning horizon, we believe men's remains a $1 billion opportunity. We also recently brought our men's footwear in-house, including production management, where we were previously only doing design. While the business is still in its infancy, we have been very pleased with our initial results. And, of course, we also remain focused on building Coach, Inc.'s market share within the fragmented men's and women's $27 billion global premium footwear category, which we estimate will grow at mid-single-digit pace over our planning horizon. Looking ahead, we see significant growth opportunities for the Stuart Weitzman and Coach brands in this category. While Jane will provide additional details on sales and distribution by geography, we wanted to touch on some current trends and strategies by market. So I'll turn it over to Andre for a discussion of North America.