GPS
#No problem.
Thank you.
I'll talk quickly about the e-commerce piece and then I'll hand it over to <UNK> on the other one.
So to me the big issue and the big opportunity, and it is both an issue and an opportunity, is the continued growth of mobile traffic.
Anybody who is telling you the truth will tell you that it's become probably a majority of their traffic growing very, very fast.
And so we are really aggressively focused on making sure that as our traffic pivots from a desktop or a laptop or even a tablet onto a mobile device, that we are able to monetize that traffic.
And so it's about a number of things that we've talked about before that we continue to push aggressively on, starting with responsive design that delivers a great mobile experience off of one website, but then making sure that the shopping experience is easy, greater use of inventory versus text, a great checkout experience, cap to applied promotion capabilities which we put in place.
And so making sure that the experience is both emotional, immersive, and aspirational on a mobile device as a brand experience, but also transactionally efficient as a customer buying on the mobile device.
That's probably the biggest opportunity that we've got right now and we're very aggressively focused on it.
It is moving very quickly.
We are excited about it.
Our traffic is growing, but the mobile device experience is different than a desktop experience and we need to make sure that we can make money there in the same way that we can make money on the other real estate.
<UNK>, do you want to ---+ .
Yes.
I would say it's fair to say, <UNK>, that we are not expecting big meaningful turns from the current trends we've seen both at Banana and Gap.
Now we know Gap's performance actually has marginally improved on a two-year basis when you look at the comps, et cetera.
But it's marginal, and so we are not expecting any big upswing there.
And then Banana's has decelerated, so we are certainly not expecting any, you know, major change in trend there.
I think more broadly speaking, we are just looking at the environment.
And as <UNK> said, we need to be prepared to compete.
Even though our inventories, we're pleased that we exceeded our goal in terms of coming in clean.
We are just being realists about the promotional environment we may be facing and that is sort of where we landed in the area we landed.
Sure.
Yes.
I'll back up a little bit, <UNK>, because we definitely try and buy to current demand; we never buy on hope.
So a lot of the work we do on inventory is to make sure that the teams are grounded in current trends, current traffic trends especially.
What happened with Old Navy was really all about September's trend dropping off from what we had seen.
So September, again, was that all-important five-week month and we never saw Labor Day come ---+ or, I'm sorry, five-week month and we never really saw Labor Day come.
And in a high-velocity business like Old Navy, where every day of a holiday and certainly every week is very meaningful, when you get backed up, it spells trouble for October.
We fortunately, earlier in the year, made a decision across all of our brands, especially Banana and Gap, that we were going to go into the last quarter much tighter.
So we had pulled back units across all of our brands and we feel comfortable that the combination of how we are entering with the much tighter receipting that will go on in the fourth quarter, we are going to be tight.
We are going to be in good shape in terms of inventory.
We've guided to that about flat at the end of the fourth quarter, but it's important to remember that that's lapping a minus 6.
So we're going to ---+ a minus 6 on Q3's ending two-year minus 6, so we're feeling pretty good because we want to walk that line that we want to have enough inventory to give us a possibility of those positive comps.
And yet we want to be tight.
I'd like to thank everyone for joining us on the call today.
As a reminder, the press release, which is available on gapinc.com, contains a full recap of our third-quarter results, as well as the forward-looking guidance included in our prepared remarks.
As always, the Investor Relations team will be available after the call for further questions.
Thank you.
