Richard A. Hayne
Analyst · Janney Capital Markets
Thank you, Ted, and good afternoon, everyone. As Frank reported, the company posted record sales and profit for the second quarter. Our brands built on some of the early product successes delivered in the first quarter, like colored denim, other bottoms and dresses, and invested in these categories with excellent results. From a channel perspective, newly opened stores, strong Direct-to-Consumer demand and a robust wholesale business drove the year-over-year sales increases. At the same time, our brand teams managed inventories tightly, leading to lower markdowns as a percent of total sales and to higher profits. Overall, we are pleased with our performance and believe it reflects the steady progress we set out to deliver. Highlights of the quarter include Direct-to-Consumer comp sales accelerated from Q1 with all brands registering solid, double-digit, year-over-year gains. This resulted in the Direct-to-Consumer penetration increasing by 190 basis points to 20%. The Urban brand delivered positive retail comps in all product categories except women's accessories; the Anthropologie brand produced positive regular price comparable sales; the Free People brand drove comparable sales gains in the retail and wholesale channels; total comparable store inventories decreased by 5%; and, as Ted mentioned, the performance of the European operations softened somewhat in the second quarter. This was primarily due to weakness in our London stores. We are not, however, Euro skeptics. We will continue to invest in our European businesses and are particularly excited about the opportunities we see to expand our Direct-to-Consumer channel across Europe. Now let me discuss some exciting developments in our North American Direct-to-Consumer business. As I mentioned above, sales during the quarter in this business accelerated significantly. The growth was largely driven by a 31% year-over-year increase in traffic to our web and mobile sites, a 75% year-over-year increase in web-exclusive product available on those sites, and the launch of a number of technology improvements geared to support the web channel. I'll go over 3 major initiatives. First, we successfully launched our of pick, pack and ship capability. This gives us the ability to fulfill an online or in-store order from any store or fulfillment location in the United States based on inventory availability, proximity or a number of other factors. This functionality has a number of very important benefits, including enabling our brands to sell web-exclusive items that had been returned to the stores without first returning them to the fulfillment center. It also allows us to ship orders that are out of stock in the fulfillment center but in stock in the store. And finally, it allows the brands to better manage the disposal of their in-store markdowns. We have successfully tested this function toward the end of the second quarter and have slowly included more stores and more product categories. Based on the analysis of our early results, we estimate that this initiative should account for many millions of dollars in additional sales across all brands in the second half of this year. The second initiative helping to accelerate the Direct-to-Consumer growth is our company-wide effort to focus on customer acquisition. This includes increasing the marketing spend at each brand. Historically, we have managed our marketing and related customer acquisition costs based on the conversion rate and the immediate revenue generated. We are now able to utilize our internal consumer database to calculate an approximate lifetime value of new customers and thus, we can more accurately adjust the cost to the benefits of acquisition. Using these new tools, we increased total web-based marketing expenditures by 21% in the second quarter, and we plan to accelerate the rate of increase in the second half of the year. Some of this increase in Web-based marketing is offset by a decrease in our catalog marketing expenses. Finally, during the second quarter we successfully continued to expand our web-exclusive product offering. As an example, last year during the second quarter, we offered approximately 750 dress styles online across all of our brands. This year, we increased that offering by approximately 50% and saw an excellent return. We believe we can continue to enlarge the assortment in dresses and many other categories as well. These are 3 examples of the many initiatives we have to increase sales at our Direct-to-Consumer channel. But we have not forgotten about other areas of growth. As I mentioned earlier, we continue to invest in new stores, both domestically and internationally. In total, we plan to open approximately 51 new stores this year. In addition, we are currently engaged in the process of rethinking the bricks-and-mortar experience with the goal of making it more exciting and enticing. We are also planning to expand our distribution of the Free People wholesale product around the globe, concentrating first on the U.K. later this year and then in Japan in fiscal year 2014. In summary, we are excited about the progress made during the second quarter. Our entire organization is focused on continued, steady, year-over-year improvement throughout the remainder of the year. Our longer-term goal is to grow annual revenues significantly faster than the industry average and more commensurate with our historic rate. We are mindful of the challenges we face: an extremely competitive retail environment and a fragile world economy. But I believe we have the elements for success: our brands are compelling, our strategy is clear and we have strong merchants in place. I thank our senior team and all of our 18,000 coworkers worldwide for their hard work, their dedication and their inspiration. I also thank our shareholders for their continued support. At this time, we'll open the call to questions. [Operator Instructions]