Established 1999
 
8,000 companies from
USA,Canada and India.
 
   
Search over 25,000 News & Earnings Archives    
 
Earnings Analysis: 
Urban Outfitters Fourth Quarter Earnings Call
Author: Rozalina Destanova
123jump.com
Last Update: 5:24 AM EDT March 10 2008


(Continued)

Email article | Print article

Net sales at the Philadelphia-based retailer rose about 29% to $465.4 million, while comparable-store sales grew by 11%. Direct sales increased by 39% to $72.9 million, driven by a circulation increase of just 19%. The company’s operating expense leveraged 101 basis points to 22.3%, principally due to the leveraging of direct store controllable and other corporate expense. Urban Outfitters plans to open 45 to 49 new stores during fiscal 2009.

 
Barbara Wyckoff (Buckingham Research): If you could do Urban and Anthro’s fourth quarter over again, what would you do differently in terms of flow, classification mix, et cetera?

Glen T. Senk: We all have hindsight meetings at the end of every quarter and there are things that we would do differently but I think with an ROS that is the second-highest in our company’s history, with a turnaround at Urban that is faster than what we committed in May, with high double-digit comps at Free People and Anthropologie, with extraordinary gains in the direct-to-consumer business, I am happy. Dick for a long time has always used the analogy of a target, a bow-and-arrow target and we talk about whether or not we hit the bullseye or a couple of rungs out. I think that Free People and Anthropologie came close to hitting a bullseye in the fourth quarter and Urban is hitting the target.

Tedford G. Marlow: The assortment challenges that we have had in Urban, getting the assortment balanced the way that we want to drive the business is something that we have not had as much issue with in the direct side and our marketing package in direct I think has done nothing but treat us exceptionally over the past year. There is content there that the customer has responded favorably to and we have had good learnings for turning the corner into this year. I expect the business to continue to deliver where we have been, if not improve.

Glen T. Senk: There is significant margin upside at Urban, because the markdowns were unfavorable to plan and to last year, but we also believe that there is significant opportunity at all of our brands. Free People achieved a staggering run-rate of just under $1100 a foot this year, but Meg and her team believe that there is opportunity there. Anthropologie is just below $800, and I think we can pick up a significant amount of productivity against that number.

Lauren Levitan (SG Cowen & Company): Can you give insights into the own brand penetration versus the private label?

Glen T. Senk: The own brand business at Free People other than denim, is virtually 100% of the apparel business. At Anthropologie, the own brand business comprises 50% of the women’s assortment and as we said at Urban, in the fourth quarter it was 18%. For Urban and Anthropologie, 50% to 60% is a healthy number. Dick’s vision that dates back probably more than 30 years was always to have an eclectic mix of market product and own brand product, so that we could leverage the risk or mitigate the risk. In terms of reaction time, there is no difference between our own brand product and the market product at this point. We are big enough at this point where we can not go into a market vendor and buy product that is hanging. They have to cut to order for us. On the other hand, Barbara has made tremendous accomplishments, progress with chase. Literally, we were at an Anthropologie meeting on Monday and there was an item, a best-selling knit-top ever in the history of the company, I believe, sold 30% its first week. Barbara was able to get a re-order in two weeks. I mean, that was unheard of. That would have been unheard even a year ago. The re-orderability and the maneuverability are relatively equal. If anything, we are more maneuverable internally than we are externally and from a strategic point of view, for Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie, I think 50% is a good number and at Free People, it will be higher.

Lauren Levitan (SG Cowen & Company): At Free People you are using Free People, how about brands and labels at Anthro and Urban?

Glen T. Senk: The whole essence of own brand, what we are trying to accomplish is we are trying to make the product that we design and manufacture ourselves compete with the best labels in the industry and it was about a year, year-and-a-half ago where Dick and I were brainstorming and he challenged me to start a wholesale business at Anthropologie. My first reaction was that it was a bad idea because I did not want to share what I felt was proprietary information at Anthropologie. After talking it over with Dick, he challenged me to think about the fact that if we created a wholesale label, it would cause our internal team to have to compete with the best and there would be tremendous benefits that accrued back to our own brand product. We did a lot of research and we rethought the process and thanks to Dick and the Anthropologie team, we launched Leifsdottir. It is entirely possible that we will launch other brands, wholesale brands in the company. Within our stable of owned brands, there is a tremendous emphasis on making them better. Each brand has to have a strong DNA and handwriting. Each brand has to have a consistency to the way it is marketed, a consistency to the details and so on.

Liz Dunn (Thomas Weisel Partners): Can you talk about SG&A in 2008?

John E. Kyees: SG&A this coming year will leverage at 3.5% to 4% comps, so we would expect it not to grow much more than 20%, which makes us comfortable in terms of SG&A leverage going forward.

Liz Dunn (Thomas Weisel Partners): Where exactly you will be spending and where there may be some opportunities?

John E. Kyees: The only issue would be Terrain, where we would expect to swallow several times a couple million dollars a year in incremental SG&A expense, and we are comfortable with that as an R&D process that helps develop that brand. Outside of that, there are not any other significant SG&A additions. We will continue to add designers but those get charged to product and not to SG&A.

Neely Tamminga (Piper Jaffray): What role beauty has at Anthropologie?

Glen T. Senk: My participation on the board at Bare Essentials has no bearing on my role at Urban Outfitters. Urban and Anthro have been in the soaps and lotions business for years and I will expect that they will continue to do so. When we look at productivity, we look at it in many ways. First, we look at the fuel, so the product. We have learned that good inventory flow will drive the business, the more we can improve our flow and increase our flow, the more accurately we can get the right product to the right store at the right time, the more we are going to drive our business. We do not use price promotions or traditional marketing to drive our business. We use product to drive our business and we think there is opportunity with the CTM project to improve the fuel content. Number two, store sighting - store locations and store design is a way that we impact productivity. We have invested in analytical tools. We have gotten much more disciplined in the way we approach our real estate selection process. We have also gotten a lot more discipline in the way we design our stores and there is continued opportunity to do that. We have made a lot of progress but there is continued opportunity in the way we manage our stores - something as simple as the way we staff on an hourly basis to something more complex. The CRM package which launched at Anthropologie this past year, I believe long-term will be at all three brands or four brands. We are driving across country without a map right now in our retail business. Eighty-four percent of our business is driven by bricks and mortar and we do not know who is shopping there. Imagine the impact in productivity when we have recency, frequency, monetary, and type information on our retail database.

Christine Chen (Needham & Company): You had mentioned in the past that the balance of the assortment at Urban would be where you would like it to be by the spring quarter. How is the progress of that?

Glen T. Senk: I do not think I would ever make a categorical statement, kind of point in time. What I said is that I felt we would return to a positive state of business within six to nine months and again, congratulations to Ted and his team for doing that. Getting the assortment where we want it, looks much better than it did six months ago but I think that we will have a significant opportunity for many months to come.

Richard Jaffe (Stifel Nicolaus): As the company grows by leaps and bounds, is there a need to staff up on a senior management level, not only with Anthropologie but some of the brands you are developing on the wholesale side, as well as the retail side?

Glen T. Senk: Hiring and developing the leadership of this company is my number one job. Bill and his group have done an exceptional job supporting me and the rest of the group and the company. Bill hired 68 people just in the home office this past quarter. In terms of the Anthropologie job search, we still are down to a narrow field. We have three good candidates. It is a critical job and we are not going to make the decision before we are ready to make the decision but we intend to make that decision in the near future. In terms of the rest of the leadership, I feel good about the leaders in this company. We have, for example, the woman who is running the Leifsdottir brand started with us as an associate buyer seven or eight years ago. Chrissie Meehan has started with us as our national sales manager six years ago. Sheila Harrington has started with us as the first buyer in the company. Ted has Jim Bret, he has a gentlemen named John Hauser running the stores organization. At Anthropologie I think the reason why we have been able to run the business is five of the six leaders in that business have been there since their jobs were created. One of Bill’s priorities and Freeman’s priorities for the year that we are just entering is to put in place a senior development program for leadership. Dick and I have spent many hours talking about the old development program at Federated and we are committed to reinventing that for our own company as we move forward.

Marni Shapiro (The Retail Tracker): Could you give color around some of your wholesale businesses, both at Anthro and Free People?

Meg Hayne: We The Free will be in its own department in some of the larger department stores and then in boutiques, we are going after a different account base, so they will be separate from Free People. In our own stores, We The Free select stores will be merchandised in the Free People stores.
  1  2  3  4  5

 


 

350 Fund Managers Interviews - 10-year Annual earnings on 4,600 U.S. companies - 20-quarter Earnings on 3,800 U.S. companies - 3,200 U.S. IPO Prospectuses
- 2,100 Economic data releases from U.S., EU, UK, India, HK and Australia. 10-year Annual reports on 3,500 U.S. companies -
U.S. Earnings Calendar with 4,800 companies - 90,000 10-K reports - 26,000 Global markets news archive - 2,200 Earnings Conference Call Summaries

© 1999-2008 123jump.com. All rights reserved