American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. (NYSE:AEO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jen Foyle: Yes, absolutely. And we’ve really changed our testing process in American Eagle so that we can be a little bit more nimble, and we can be a little bit more flexible, not only with silhouettes, but with wash. I’ve learned a lot in my couple of years in American Eagle. And it’s not just about one thing in a jean, sometimes it’s about wash. Sometimes, it’s about a new fit. And that’s where I think we can really dominate because of the way we test and go to market. We are seeing a lot more agility there, Marni, to your point. And we’re seeing trends improve in denim, which is good news, at least in American Eagle. Albeit we’re offsetting it with newer ideas at this stage, and that was intentional. We sort of forecasted this.

So we have other new ideas to help offset. But I’m looking for — jeans never go away. That was the funniest commentary. I could actually quote Roger Markfield from years ago, will jeans and T-shirt in America ever go away. It’s just — they soften and then we have to be prepared for the next trend. And I think this team did an outstanding job with the spring assortment, making sure that we’re leveraging the new trends in bottoms where we do, do an incredible job. And now as I mentioned, Marni, we have new tops and other things that are working and that we can really try and chase. So look, there’s good news here. It’s early on. We like what we saw in February, but I also like our ability to react and what we’re reacting to and the nimbleness.

So there’s more to come here. And hopefully, you’ll hear this enthusiasm with me at the end of Q1.

Marni Shapiro: Thank you so much guys.

Jay Schottenstein: Also Jen, you have other businesses, too, that we’re very excited on. We have our Todd Snyder business, which is growing very strongly. And we’re very excited about that. On subscribe, we’re excited about. We have a lot of the positive things going on.

Marni Shapiro: Thanks guys.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Jonna Kim with TD — Cowen. Please proceed with your question.

Jonna Kim: Thank you for taking my question. Just curious about the Quiet Logistics platform and how you’re thinking about long-term. You mentioned that the revenue growth and profitability, you’re revisiting that for 2023. What’s sort of your assumption there? And how do you still think about the long-term trajectory? And in terms of the Aerie comp growth, how should we think about the cadence as we start to lap the impact of the new stores? Thank you so much.

Jay Schottenstein: You’re talking about Quiet, it’s a valuable acquisition. We need the capacity to be able to fulfill our orders for our brand and Quiet gave us the efficiencies and speed. And at the end of the day, we still believe that if you don’t win at the logistics, you’re not going to win the model in specialty retail in order to compete against everybody. So we’re still committed to that. We want to get — if we want to get like a better bottom-line there. And Michael Rempell could talk about that for a second.

Michael Rempell: Yes. Thanks Jay. I mean you really can’t separate the two issues. So, one is Quiet provides tremendous support for our brands and our business. It gave us capacity, like Jay mentioned, faster delivery times. And of course, we’ve consistently reduced our delivery cost per order to customers. over the last couple of years, which is pretty unique in retail. But like I said, the third-party business just hasn’t ramped to our expectations. It saw great growth. It grew almost 40%, but that was below what we expected and it did at a margin that was below what we expected. So, while we’re not giving up on the business at all, we still think it’s going to be a very valuable business someday. We are resetting our plans.