Brendan Hoffman
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is open
Thank you, Jen and thanks everyone for joining us today. With the first quarter behind us, we feel good about where we are relative to our expectations for the year. The quarter came in largely as expected. The business was challenging in places we thought it will be challenging and the retail environment remain difficult. However, we have greater confidence today that there is opportunity for healthy growth when you have product that connects with the consumer. We believe this bodes well for our fall season when we begin to introduce the first line that really recaptures the brand DNA. I mentioned last time that we had recently presented our fall women’s line to our wholesale partners and received overwhelmingly positive response. Last month, we presented our men’s pre-spring collection and the reception was just as enthusiastic. Perhaps more importantly, we have begun to take the women’s collection on the road to preview selling associates and managers from our largest accounts and they were delighted beyond their expectations. Let me remind you that given the timing of Rea and Christopher’s return, while we will start to see a major changeover beginning in August, it will not be until our holiday delivery in the fourth quarter that you will see the on-floor assortment fully represent the look and feel of the brand. Importantly, we have maintained our leadership position in the department stores, which gives us further confidence that there will be a strong appetite for the product offering we deliver later this year. We continue to work closely with our partners to ensure that we are analyzing what’s working well with our brand in stores and applying those learnings as we move forward to help us further improve our offering, presentation and overall customer experience. However, keep in mind that despite the positive feedback, our partners remain conservative with their initial buys given the current retail environment as expected. As I said in our last call, we are working on some initiatives that will enable us to quickly chase business and capture incremental sales if performance exceeds expectations, while maintaining careful control over our inventory. In our retail stores, we purposely and strategically pulled back on a number of promotions during the quarter. We eliminated a four-week tiered promotional event and shifted to a more exclusive friends and family event. While sales in the weeks during these events were below last year, we have seen stronger sales outside of these events. We are learning that we can achieve a more consistent flow of business without hyper promotions and that we can retrain our customers to buy full price and not wait for our promotions. Our target customer appreciates the design and quality that goes into our merchandise and we believe that you won’t hesitate to buy at full price if we give the right product. Going forward, we will continue to be very strategic in our promotional strategy to help us to protect and elevate the brand image as our new collection begins to hit the stores. Our e-commerce business had a strong quarter. While sales in this channel were also impacted by the changes to our promotional strategy, again, we feel that this is a net positive for the brand over the long-term. As we look forward, we will continue to grow this business as we migrate to a new platform that will enable us to increase the functionality of the site and launch a creative overhaul to better align the site with the Vince brand DNA. We also continued to round out our team with two great additions. We have a new Senior Vice President of Retail, who will be responsible for the buying, merchandising, presentation and operations at all of our retail locations as we continue to build that business. In addition, a new Vice President and Brand Director just joined us and will lead our branding efforts and help us to better connect with our customers as well as reaching new ones. They both have incredibly strong industry experience and knowledge as well as a long history with Vince. And I look forward to working with them as we execute on our vision for the brand. Finally, we continue to make investments in the business that will ultimately support our long-term growth. During the first quarter, we substantially completed the changeover to our new distribution center, which will enable us to better control our inventory going forward and in turn drive gross margin expansion. In addition, we continue to make progress in our IT migration, which is due to be completed later this year. Among the benefits will be better reporting and analytics as well as improved functionality on the website, which should also drive higher margin in the future. Overall, we are on track with our plans for the year. While we expect that the business will remain challenged throughout much of 2016, we are taking actions that we believe position us to deliver improved financial performance as we move throughout the year and into 2017. Importantly, we are continuing to make great progress setting the stage for long-term profitable growth by making decisions that are right for the integrity of the brand. Now, I will turn it over to Dave to review our financial performance. Dave?