FRAN
#Yes, thank you so much for the question.
Speed to market is something that's really important to us.
In fact, that will be one of the key initiatives that support the strategic pillar of invigorate merchandising on a go-forward basis.
We have talked a whole lot about how we can improve all of our supply chain initiatives, speed being a very key element of that.
I think that not only will we continue to focus on that but, yes, we did focus on that in this back half of the year.
As we saw opportunities, in wovens for instance, in our fashion tops, the wovens, the plaids, the checks, they have done so well.
And we did chase back into some of those categories.
I talked about some of our jackets, like our vests have done extremely well.
There have been a lot of areas where our team, our planning and allocation team, have really done a pretty spectacular job this back half of the year, of helping us not only plan the right inventories.
But also as we saw accelerated sales in certain areas, they have taken the challenge and have had the ability to chase back into some of those.
That's one reason why our sales continue to accelerate off of a very good third quarter.
Okay.
I'm going to try to remember all of those.
In fact, I'm going to answer some parts of other questions that were asked.
You guys ask so many multiple questions it's hard for me to remember all of them to give you the answers.
In terms of outlet stores, let's talk about that a little bit.
We're really excited about where our outlet stores opportunity lies and exists for us.
We are still in the early stages of figuring out how best to optimize that, but we have a lot of great plans.
As I mentioned, that is one of the key six strategies is to optimize and drive our outlet business.
So we will do that.
It will be a mixture of merchandise.
It will rely on a lot of clearance merchandise.
It will also have a great mix of season-right fresh, new merchandise in there because, really, outlets are just another distribution channel.
They're not just there to clear your merchandise.
They are a big help with that and I'm glad we have them for that.
But also there's the opportunity to sell great new fresh merchandise to the many people that travel to outlets and even make them an occasion to visit an outlet mall.
Because many of them are located outside of city centers, a half hour to an hour drive away.
So I think there's a big opportunity for us to drive clearance business as well as new fresh merchandise in our outlet stores going forward.
As far as the economics of the outlets, it's kind of interesting.
I've worked with outlets in both of my prior companies before here as well.
And what it tends to end up being is that your merch margins tend to be lower because you do have a larger mix of clearance and off-price merchandise in the outlet, because that is a big reason for their existence.
But at the same time, generally you offset that by driving higher sales volumes in an average outlet store.
They tend to be a little bit larger in size.
Quite frankly, because many of them are operated far outside of major city centers, the occupancy is usually a little bit less.
The net, net, net of all of this is that once optimized, outlets should drive approximately the same type of profit opportunity as any other of our boutiques.
So that's the overall economics on that.
I think you did ---+ you were asking also about what kind of investments and capital expenditures, et cetera, we would have partly in driving our long-term Vision 2020 strategic plan.
We will get into that much more in the future.
We are still in the process of firming up our 2016 annual budget and how that fits into our long-term strategic plan process and looking at our five-year plan as well.
So we'll get into that as appropriate.
We'll start that discussion when we give FY16 guidance at our year-end call after the end of the year for 2015.
Thank you.
Sure, thanks.
When we look at where our apparel business is going and what kind of things that we have moving forward, it's really more of a casual everyday feel.
As I mentioned, it's very stylish, it's very fashionable but it's not overly trendy.
So it's not here today gone tomorrow and I think that will help us to drive into the chase.
Because quite frankly, in apparel there's a lot that we can do to evolve the strategy into the next season, as opposed to, well, that's done, get rid of it and what's new, and gosh, I hope that works.
So I think that there's a bit more consistency that we can drive season to season with where our customer is today and how she is thinking about her wardrobing needs.
There's big opportunities in that.
I feel very good that the trends that we have can continue forward and that we do have a pretty good handle on it and that we can continue to chase effectively and really be ready for whatever hits us.
As I mentioned, the team did a great job chasing.
Clearly we had a strong Q3 performance and an acceleration and a strong start to Q4.
The team's done a great job chasing so far.
We still feel we're well prepared for the rest of the holiday season with these big weeks that are in front of us.
We're excited about that and that should bode well also for any clearance activities that we have to do post-holiday.
Good timing at this point for that to come together.
In terms of the SG&A and investments, again, we will go a lot more into that when we lay out our 2016 budget guidance.
It's something that we really don't want to cross over into now.
We feel like we're well positioned, that we are balancing the proper investments that we will, and need to, make against the performance of our business.
I'm really glad to see that our business has picked up and is performing extremely well, especially the back half.
And that allows us to be able to continue making additional investments alongside those that we've already made this year which are driving part of that performance.
It becomes a really important balancing act, to balance the investments, to find the right team members, to locate the best executives as I feel we've done in many areas.
Alongside Laurie, our Chief Merchant, and Eric, our Senior VP of Direct and Marketing, we've also brought in, as we've mentioned on prior calls, a new Senior VP in the IT department.
That is going to help us build the infrastructure to support all of the strategic initiatives.
It doesn't happen without having the right processes and the right infrastructure in place.
We've recently also added a new VP into our real estate area that I believe brings a lot of wonderful ideas in terms of ways that we can continue to drive our brick and mortar strategy and push it forward for the future and make sure the next three or four years are great years in terms of finding the best real estate and optimizing it.
So that's where we're at on that.
Thank you, Lisa.
Thanks to all of you for joining us for our Q3 results and our Q4 and full-year guidance conference call today.
We look forward to speaking with you again after the close of the year for our full-year 2015 results and 2016 guidance initiation call.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to wish you all a wonderful and happy holiday season.
Thank you.
