Mark Brody
Analyst · JPMorgan
Thank you, Jennifer. And thank you everyone for joining us today to discuss our second quarter 2015 results. I'll begin with an update on the quarter and our revised outlook, followed by some comments on our near-term and long-term growth initiatives. Then, I'll turn it over to Dave for a more detailed review of the financials and outlook. First off, I am delighted to be serving as Interim CEO for Vince during this transition period. As many of you know, I have served on the Board of Vince since Sun Capital's original acquisition of Kellwood in 2008, and continue to believe that Vince is a powerful brand with tremendous long-term growth potential. I would also like to thank Jill Granoff, who has been very helpful in transitioning her responsibilities to me, following her resignation in July, and we wish her well in her future endeavors. I am also pleased that Dave Stefko has agreed to take on the role of Interim CFO and Treasurer, as we search for a new CEO and CFO. I have worked with Dave for four years at Sun Capital, and we are both extremely focused on improving the business, while also ensuring a smooth transition. Since I took on an interim executive management role at Vince in June, I have spent considerable time working the teams to gain a deeper understanding of their issues and strategies. Based on this work, I continue to believe that the overall strategy is the right one for the company, specifically enhancing our women's assortment, further developing our men's business, selectively opening new retail stores, leveraging e-commerce to drive awareness in sales, and broadening our international reach. However, to achieve these strategic goals, we do need to focus more than ever on improving the product and our operational performance as well as take corrective actions to protect and enhance the strength of the Vince brand. Vince has a strong team in place, who is passionate about the brand, and we are working closely with these individuals to take aggressive steps that will put us on the path to improved performance. In the area of product, which is paramount at Vince, while we continue to evolve and improve our lines, we are intently focused on creating exceptional products that are properly aligned with the styles most desired by our Vince customers. We also want to provide them with a beautiful fit and an improved balance of good, better, and best products in our assortment. As mentioned in our release in July, we are very excited about the addition of Livia Lee, as Senior Vice President of Merchandising. Livia brings a strong track record to Vince, and is off to a great start in the brief time she has been with the brand. In regards to improving our operational performance, our top priority is to focus on improving our inventory management. During the second quarter, we saw further weakness in our wholesale business, due to lower than expected sell-throughs and customer reorders, which significantly increased our inventory position. As a result, we wrote down current year product estimated net realizable value. In addition, our off-price customers reported high levels of inventory. Given our efforts to reduced sales to the off-price channel, we decided to dispose the vast majority of the prior-year product that was being allocated to this channel, which we believe is in the best long-term interest of our brand. Combined, these actions led to a $14.4 million write-down on excess inventory in each product. This measure should better position us to provide a consistent flow of newness to our department and specialty store partners, while enabling us to reduce our penetration in the off-price channel. We also took steps to ensure that sales, planning, and sourcing teams are fully aligned on all aspects of our inventory buys, with the goals of optimizing our full-price selling opportunities and delivering stronger gross margins. This will help us to facilitate improved inventory management by buying tighter upfront and create a more consistent flow of newness to our customers. In addition, we are exploring ways to shorten our product development cycle and improve efficiencies in the supply chain. As it relates to our outlook for the remainder of the year, given our recent performance as well as additional insights we have gained on our customer sell-throughs and inventory positions, we have reevaluated our second half outlook. We now expect further weakness in our wholesale channel above what was factored into our previous guidance. In our DTC channel, we are reducing our comp outlook to reflect softer selling trends. We also expect gross margin to be negatively impacted by increased discounting that we believe will be required. As a result, we are lowering our fiscal 2015 sales and earnings guidance. Dave will provide details on our updated guidance in his remarks. As I said earlier, we remain committed to executing the long-term growth strategy that has been laid out for the business. Let me now walk you through some of the progress we are making on our key growth initiatives. We are working to further develop our handbag business. As mentioned in our prior call, we took feedback from our customers from our initial launch, and improved product functionality and adjusted price points to be more competitive with our offerings. These changes were introduced with our fall collection, and while we are encouraged by the improved sell-throughs, we still see opportunity to improve our handbag offering and drive incremental sales in the category. We also continue to grow our handbag distribution, and our fall 2015 handbag collection will be presented in 180 doors as compared to 45 doors with the initial launch. Our licensed footwear business continues to perform well. With our fall 2015 collection, we are on track to expand our women's footwear to over 500 doors and our men's footwear to nearly 150 doors. As a result of the strong consumer demand, we are dedicating more space in our new retail stores to showcase the expanded footwear assortment. We are also highlighting this expanded assortment digitally on our website to drive further growth. In addition, we recently made the decision mutually with our licensing partner to exit the kid's line, as this is not a core business for Vince. And we felt it was productive to focus on other areas, where we see bigger growth opportunities. We are also focused on continuing to grow the direct-to-consumer business through both, store openings and expansion of the e-commerce channel. We've opened seven stores year-to-date and plan to open an additional four stores by the end of fiscal 2015. Overall, we continue to be pleased with the performance of our new stores. International expansion also remains a significant part of our growth strategy. We are focused on increasing penetration in key markets and growing our international business, which is approximately 10% of total sales. This past quarter, we hired a highly experienced Vice President of International to help us drive this growth. At the end of the quarter, we opened new shop locations in Printemps, Selfridges, Liberty, and Harvey Nichols to showcase the women's product line. In conclusion, there is a lot of work to be done to get business back on track, and we are diligently working to find a new CEO and CFO for the business. While we are undertaking numerous steps to drive improved performance, we expect the pressures we are facing in the wholesale channel will take time to correct, and expect these pressures to continue as we head into fiscal 2016. That said, we are committed to taking additional aggressive measures to get the company on the right path to deliver consistent, long-term growth, while we continue to move forward with our multiple strategic growth opportunities. With that, I'll turn it over to Dave to review our financial performance.