Delta Apparel, Inc. (AMEX:DLA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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James Wilen: And could you comment about what your competitors have in the Evergreen inventory and how they are addressing their problems that everyone has with too much inventory and at a higher cost to cotton?

Bob Humphreys: So, I think it varies by a competitor. There’s you know, a significant amount of production that is currently sitting idle in Central America as we’ve seen happen in the past, and so they will be reducing inventory, I’m sure, both in units and the value in that inventory. We went into the beginning of this fiscal year under inventoried as an industry. You’ll recall, our first couple of quarters of the fiscal year, we were scrambling to fulfill orders and you know in general, the industry was so. It doesn’t take too long to start shutting down this production that these inventories get into shape pretty darn quickly, and hopefully we’ll do that and have a smooth takeoff and landing where we have the right inventories at the right time and don’t have too few or too many to service our customers. So we’ll remain mindful of that.

James Wilen: Is finishing the year with $50 million less inventory a reasonable objective?

Bob Humphreys: Yes.

James Wilen: Okay, very good.

Bob Humphreys: You know it’s a combination of obviously you know lower investment in raw material costs along with less units investment. I wanted to just circle back around with you Jamie on the e-commerce piece of Salt Life. You know as we said a little bit in our prepared remarks, Salt Life has had an outsized e-commerce following, maybe not e-commerce, but social media following for many years now and it gets pointed out in different types of reports and what have you and that really accelerated even further over the last 12 months. So I think our marketing people and the brand and brand awareness and some of the television shows that we’re supporting have really done a great job of even further building the Salt Life brand.

Value has certainly got a broader geographic footprint. So I think one of the great untapped opportunities in Delta Apparel is our Salt Life e-commerce business. So it should be many times the size it is over the course of the next several years, you know based on the brand awareness and the social media interaction that we have.

James Wilen: Okay, and next time Go on.

Bob Humphreys: And highest margin piece of that business as well.

James Wilen: Right. Your stores are going to grow, your e-commerce is going to grow. What about the wholesale business in Salt Life? Has that been able to maintain a higher trajectory?

Bob Humphreys: Yes. We had by far our best year ever last year, and that was really one of the things that Simone was pointing out that hurt our e-commerce business. Those orders come in, they get self-populated. So it sucks up our inventory to ship those orders and then we didn’t have the inventory to support e-commerce. So that has been good. We remain getting good feedback and our doors being added at a regular pace, and we would expect to have another good year in our regular wholesale business.

James Wilen: Okay. Thanks fellows. I appreciate it.

Simone Walsh: Thank you so much.

Operator: And we have reached the end of our question-and-answer session, and I’ll now turn the call back over to the management for closing remarks.

Bob Humphreys : All right. Thank you for your interest in Delta Apparel as always, and we’ll look forward to updating you on our first quarter results here in just a couple of months. Hope everyone has a great holiday season.

Operator: And this concludes today’s conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

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