We have been studying it, particularly people who are new to the business, and looked to the last five years. And we have not been a company that has gone out proactively and in some brands, to different levels, with Old Navy being the first, aggressively gone after and spoken to customers and tried to get them inside the four walls of the store.
Then it is the job of the store to convert them and the quality of the product, being brand appropriate, and the work of the people who work in our stores, that is what they own in terms of conversion.
Shifting some of that marketing, put a little bit more in store into the windows, marketing vehicles that actually will get people to react positively and come into our stores, do more things that we actually buy into and plan.
Because we should not be a company that is based on promotions, we are based on moving through inventory as opposed to driving in traffic.
The last number of years anything we did promotional was based on moving through our inventory. Going forward in 2009 any investment in the gross margin, is going to be based on trying to drive in traffic.
And once we get the traffic in the door, let the stores and the product do the job of moving through the inventory. So it is a bit of a shift for us. It has taken a bit of time to make sure the right people are in place, the right accountability, the right metrics.
It is how we are going to measure ourselves in a large way next year is are we able to recapture a lot of lost customers we have had before, but also bring in new customers.
Kimberly Greenberger (Citigroup): Any idea on the timing we might see some of those new initiatives take hold?
Glenn Murphy:] Tonight you will see the beginning of it with Old Navy for sure in terms of its campaign and its communication, and it is much broader than the television.
Television is the kickoff of a multi-dimensional program and campaign and integrated communication over the next number of months to speak to Old Navy's target customer and to get people inside of those stores.
All of the brands are starting to, be very brand appropriate, which is critical to all of us, critical to the brand presidents, while still being much more proactive in how we convince customers to cross the lease line and these are the brands that they should be walking into.
Michelle Clark (Morgan Stanley): Could you give us inventory positions by division?
Sabrina Simmons: Our principle in buying inventory for all our divisions is the same, so we anchor our inventory buys on current traffic.
That is one of the most important inputs to our inventory buys. And we report traffic to you every month, so it is no surprise that to varying levels we have been experiencing negative traffic.
So, all divisions are going to be buying their inventories tightly, it is just a matter of degree how far down.
Michelle Clark (Morgan Stanley): Can you update us on localization initiatives in your stores and how much more opportunity there is there to drive an improvement in the merchandise margin rate?
Glenn Murphy: Localization is also on our list of eight or 10 priorities we have for this year.
We invested heavily on a new inventory system which was pioneered by Old Navy and is now being used fully by them in all their categories and will be taken up by Banana Republic, Gap and our outlet business throughout 2009.
One of the benefits of this strategic inventory management system we put into place is our ability to really do some work we have never done before.
Today we assort by size of store, we actually want to assort based on what consumer expectations and demand is going to be, and this new system will allow us to be much more localized, to look at the assortment in a much more different way.
Whether that is on women's or men's or kids or baby or temperature related or average household income, and it will allow us to do that work. |