PLCE
#We started liquidation of our accelerated liquidation of inventory in the third quarter as we spoke about and we continued to do that through the fourth quarter of this year.
Really pleased with our inventory positions down almost 8% which was below our guidance of mid-single digit.
It's in excellent shape.
We reduced our liability inventories ahead of the new systems coming onboard in the second half.
And as Jane indicated the inventory which we consider a liability was down over 20% to where we were a year ago.
So we'll continue to push our inventory levels.
Our goals are obviously to improve turn.
We've seen with the new systems that we're implementing that we've considerably cut back on our buys for both back-to-school and for fall.
Sure, thanks.
As far as the weather is concerned we started off the quarter strong and then as I'd mentioned midmonth we saw a pretty big change in the traffic and sales patterns with the cold and the storms that have hit.
Certainly what is embedded in our guidance for the rest of the quarter is the assumption that we will start to return to more normalized weather which we have just begun to see in the last couple of days.
So it's a little too early to predict.
But as I said we're assuming that the weather will not be as onerous as it's been since mid-February.
Regarding the port strike I can't say enough about our logistics team and the foresight they had and how they've managed inventories throughout this entire year.
We've been ahead of this and have not seen any disruption not only to the current quarter but we did not see any disruption in the third quarter or fourth quarter as well.
As we had mentioned I think on several calls why we had significant in-transits versus LY because we were ahead of that situation making sure that our goods would hit on time.
We agree with you that on pre-Easter there is probably an advantage here as upcoming or two of the biggest weeks of the quarter that we'll see pre-Easter.
What we're concerned about and what we've heard most of our competition say is that their receipts are delayed up to five, six, and in some cases more weeks than that.
So what we're concerned about is that we're going to see these missed time floor sets start to hit post-Easter into April and May and then what that is going to potentially do to the promotional environment later in the quarter and into the beginning of second.
So that's really what we're trying to call out.
Sure, thanks, <UNK>.
On the product side for the quarter we had very consistent performance.
We saw positive comps in newborn, positive comps in baby, positive comps in big, positive comps in accessory and the only area where we saw negative comp was in shoes driven by boots.
The incremental performance in Q4 versus Q3 in Canada I believe is a lot of the same reasons that we saw the performance improve in the US.
We had a much more seasonable quarter weather-wise.
We had a nice balance of wear-now product deliver late in the quarter which was well received by the customer.
And we also put a focus on gift giving over the holiday time period not only in the stores but also through our marketing and I think the customer responded well to that.
So I think we saw some of the same things in Canada merchandise-wise that we saw in the US.
Thanks.
Well as we look at the port situation we definitely think it's going to impact the back half of the first quarter and obviously we think that it could trickle over into the second quarter also.
As we look at our systems implementations we've mentioned back on the previous call and on this call that we're seeing our buys be more controlled and we're seeing units down in the high single-digit range overall and in US Place actually even a little higher.
So we believe that we have the opportunity to really when we look at AURs expect those AURs to be higher than where they were a year ago.
Sure, thanks <UNK>.
On the acquisition strategy we've done ---+ we're focused on acquisition retention and customer engagement.
And as we mentioned on a couple of the last calls we've been really focused working with our outside partner and customer segmentation.
And now that we've finished our segmentation work during the last quarter we're focused on working with our email service providers to work on a retention strategy that has more personalization components involved in it which we're starting to see some nice traction on.
On the acquisition front the things I spoke about on the call, those tools we were able to advance through some systems work that we did and those are really focused in-store on capturing email addresses.
We were not able to use some of the more sophisticated tools that other people have been using for quite some time.
But we'll be able to have those tools live in our store during the back-to-school period which should help us with acquisition during that peak traffic period and then sales into the Q4 period.
And <UNK>, from a wholesale perspective we're pretty pleased with the progress we're making there, albeit it's still relatively a small business.
We added four accounts in the back half of 2015 so we're shipping to eight accounts currently and we think that those accounts will serve as pretty good building blocks as we move forward to grow this business over time.
Where we're really focusing 2015 from a wholesale perspective is really investing in systems capabilities to allow us to better communicate with our partners, things such as EDI capabilities which we currently don't have and really looking to automate some of the processes that we have, processes that from a sales order flow through sourcing and logistics through the invoicing processes, a lot of those are manual and it's important that we automate those.
And I'll just remind everyone that both the wholesale and the international businesses are accretive to our overall operating margin and as they continue to grow will have a nice impact on our bottom line and on our margins.
From a merchandising strategy I think that we are going to continue to work on the newborn and baby business as we have been.
We've seen some nice performance over the last couple of quarters with those businesses stabilizing.
So I would say the merchandise strategy would revolve around making sure that those businesses continue to grow particularly as we hope to see a modest uptick in the birthrate trends as we go forward.
As far as the rest of the merchandising strategy I really wouldn't share too much of that for competitive reasons.
And regarding the additional 124 closures from a sales perspective they average less than $1 million per store and square footage is roughly in that $600,000 range.
So they are not our most productive doors obviously and they average a little under $200 of sales per square foot.
So you can imagine what the profitabilities are on those stores.
Anurup had mentioned that we would be closing between 25 and 30 stores in 2015.
For 2016 we'll be in that 35 store closure range with the residual in 2017.
Well, it's going to affect the latter in terms of what you spoke about.
It's all about from an initial pricing strategy all the way through the initial sellthroughs and then on a week-by-week basis dictates the overall promotional markdown cadence that we will take.
Obviously we're helping ourselves before that markdown optimization tool is put into place by really looking tightly through our assortment planning tools, getting what we think right now is appropriate levels of inventory purchases.
And when we begin to implement our allocation tool in the back half ahead of this markdown optimization by getting these goods in the right stores at the right time and being able to flow back inventory based on initial sales.
