Our partnership is with our brands remain fantastic. We have lots of focus on our business. We were focused on because of the underserved markets that we cater to and largely, we’re complementary and incremental to the market. So it’s creating a lot of opportunity and focus with our brand partners.
Sam Poser: Just, I mean, just a quick follow-up on that. When the supply chain issues were going on some time ago, you made some decisions to bring in some apparel and other things to — my impression was sort of to fill up the stores. So looking back on what happened then and for the sake of argument 70% of the product is compelling stuff, it’s going to attract that particular customer. Do you — are you just not going to buy the other 30%, even if and sort of make the stores look full with the good stuff instead of trying to fill [multiple Speakers]
Jared Briskin: Yes, I mean, I would say we never just tried about bad stuff. Obviously, we always try to buy just the good stuff. But I think as the consumer now has become a little bit more careful around some other choices, we have to continue to refine that in what we do. We’re following what we see from a pattern standpoint to consumers and we believe we have access to the things that they’re interested in. And those are things we’re making investments in, and we’re pulling back in places that we don’t believe are either on trend or the consumer doesn’t have interest in. But we never try to just buy things that we don’t think are going to resonate with our consumer. But that funnel was a lot wider when there was a lot of cash in the market. And today, the funnel is much more narrow and we’re down our focus around what we put in the assortments.
Sam Poser: Sorry, one last thing. Does that narrow funnel? I mean is the consumer more cautious or more particular? And that narrow funnel, that’s what somebody else I know uses, is a situation where when you have exactly what that consumer wants, they buy it and when they — and if somebody else is exactly what they want or another category or entertainment or something they’ll buy it from them. Is that a side of a weak consumer or just a much more particular consumer?
Jared Briskin: I think it’s some of both, to be frank. And I think Bill has got some information on this that he can talk to.
Bill Quinn: Yes, Sam. Hi Sam it’s Bill. So we’re looking at two different lenses. First of all, the existing customers we have, which is the bulk of our customers are doing well. So we actually saw them have a positive comp here in Q2, but it’s really the new customers that we’re seeing that impact. And it’s just less of them coming in. But when they come in, they’re buying the same amount actually a little bit more. Some of that is economic. We’re in the good time to sell a lot of new customers. And obviously, we’re seeing the reverse of that. And some of that is timing where we saw new customers. We saw a nice increase in July and the start of back-to-school with those customers, because of back-to-school as well as launch.
Sam Poser: Thank you very much. Continued success.
Sam Poser: Thank you.
Jared Briskin: Thank you, Sam.
Operator: Our next question is from Cristina Fernandez with Telsey Advisory Group. Please proceed with your question.
Cristina Fernandez: Hi, good morning. I wanted to see if you can comment more about the composition of the inventory, particularly interested in, I guess, how much age or clearance inventory is still left versus the end of the first quarter. And the excess inventory where it’s more concentrated? Is it still primarily apparel footwear as well? Any color there would be helpful.
Jared Briskin: Yes. Cristina, it’s Jared. Yes, I think we continue to strive to get to not just an optimal level of inventory, but optimal health of inventory. The team has been working incredibly hard at this initially some of the challenges were centered around apparel and that was a significant focus of ours to get that business cleaner and healthier. And we’re largely at that point now. We still have some challenges around secondary brands and franchises. Within the footwear business, that will continue to take a little bit of time to work through. Again, as we said, we feel like we can work those things down during the back half of the year and really get to an optimal level continue to get great support from our vendor partners to help balance that inventory.
We obviously have been more promotional to try and drive through some of that aged inventory. But taking a little bit longer than we’d like, but we are making strides and feel very confident in what we can achieve in the back half based on what the team is getting accomplished.
Cristina Fernandez: And then my second question is on the outlook for the third versus — for the fourth quarter, your sales outlook implies the fourth quarter being a lot better with on my math comped down low single digits versus down mid to high in the past two quarters. So what gives you confidence that the fourth quarter will be better? Is it just the comparisons? Or are you seeing a better product launch calendar?
Jared Briskin: As we said, we’re pretty confident in our assortments as a whole and certainly in the calendar as a whole. I think our expectations are that as we get to a cleaner position on inventory and a more healthy level of inventory, we’ll have more of that excites consumers to further begin into the back half of the year.
Cristina Fernandez: And just one last clarification. I wanted to understand the outperformance in women’s relative to men and kids. Is it because the launch calendar was better for women or it’s just less dependent on the newer launch?
Jared Briskin: The women’s business is a little less dependent on the launch calendar. So there was an outsized impact to the men’s and kids business negatively as a result of the launch calendar. But as a reminder, we’ve had a heavy, heavy focus on the women’s business for a number of years now, including the reorganization of our merchant teams to get more focused around the women’s business and the kids business. So we’re pretty proud of what’s been accomplished in women’s and feel like we have a nice opportunity ahead.
Cristina Fernandez: Thank you.
Operator: Our next question is from John Lawrence with Benchmark Company. Please proceed with your question.
John Lawrence: Good morning, guys.
Mike Longo: Good morning.
Jared Briskin: Good morning.
John Lawrence: First of all, could you talk a little bit about new stores, Mike, the ones you’ve opened in the last couple of years, how are they coming out of the ground and recent openings in this environment? How do they get your [Technical Difficulty]
Mike Longo: Thank you. We’ve been very pleased with our new store performance. As we’ve repeated a couple of times, we’ve got a goal that we’ve talked about 40 to 50 net new stores a year. That includes a handful of closures every year because every retailer does that. The — I think we disclosed last year that Las Vegas was our new market and by Las Vegas. We do not mean on the script where the tourists go, we mean where the people live and those stores are doing really, really well. Very pleased with that. And of course, we’re positioning them for the big event of the Super Bowl in February. Our newest market, the news is broken on is Milwaukee. We like Milwaukee. We’ve been in past retailers been in Milwaukee quite a bit.
It’s a great market for us, and we’ll be breaking that market relatively soon. And then most importantly, so those are new markets. Most importantly, we’ve got pillow markets, which are always more profitable, because you’ve built brand equity in those markets, say, Southeastern Georgia or the Panhandle, Florida, or Arizona or parts of California. When we go fill those markets in between two stores, we can further our culture, our operational culture where we can bring in seasoned veteran players to run the stores. You can take an assistant store manager from one store and make them the store manager of the new store and they bring select members of the crew. So that always works better operationally. And then the logistics of the hub-and-spoke network that we run, we can leverage that as well.
