La-Z-Boy Incorporated (NYSE:LZB) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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Brad Thomas: That’s great. Thanks so much. I’ll turn it over to Holly.

Bob Lucian: Thank you.

Operator: Your next question for today is coming from Anthony Lebiedzinski with Sidoti & Company.

Anthony Lebiedzinski: Good morning and thank you for taking the questions. Would like to…

Melinda Whittington: Good morning, Anthony.

Anthony Lebiedzinski: Yeah, good morning. I would like to hear your perspective on just the overall inventory levels at your wholesale customers. So a year ago, there seemed to be a glut of inventory out there at the retail level. So just curious to get your thoughts as to like where are inventory levels now? Or do you think they’re more balanced and just overall would like to hear your thoughts on that?

Bob Lucian: Anthony, they’re more balanced than they were last year for sure because last year was — there was just a lot of ordering that wasn’t happening. The — at our — what we’ll call our major accounts or our larger customers, they’re pretty much back to where they expect to be. Our Furniture Galleries — our independent Furniture Galleries are also back to the inventory levels that they expect to be. Where we’re still seeing some issues, if you will, with a little bit slower ordering due to inventory still being brought back down or with some of the general dealers, the smaller general dealers that we deal with.

Anthony Lebiedzinski: All right. Thank you for that. And then I thought the partnership that you talked about with Rooms to Go sounded interesting. Is this the first of its kind that you have out there? Or is it like — just curious to get your perspective on how this came about and whether you’d be open to doing other similar type partnerships?

Melinda Whittington: Historically, half our sales are coming from general dealer types, right, non-furniture galleries of what we’re making, it’s selling to non-furniture gallery type customers. And so it’s not new, right, to have a broad channel strategy and what we know in a highly fragmented furniture market, — there are — we would have as many consumers as we can come into our furniture galleries because that’s where we believe we can give them the best full brand experience. But we also recognize that we have consumers that are never going to walk into a furniture gallery. And so we’re looking — we have been always looking for the right partners that can attract a different consumer that might not ever walk in. What we love about and when we called out Rooms to Go, what is a bit unique about it is it’s a larger account, larger than some we’ve opened up in a while.

And it’s unique in that it is an extremely narrow band of product around recliners where Rooms to Go was looking at really going into that space and wanted to partner with us to have the best of the best in the recliner space and really focus on a consumer that otherwise wouldn’t be in store. So we’ll always look for that broader channel strategy and managing the conflict so that the right consumers are going into our furniture galleries, but this is just a great example of catching a broader base.

Anthony Lebiedzinski: Got it. Okay. Thanks for the clarification, Melinda. Definitely appreciate it. All right, well, that’s all I had. Thank you very much and best of luck.

Melinda Whittington: Thank you.

Bob Lucian: Thank you, Anthony.

Operator: We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. And I will now turn the call over to Mark for closing remarks.

Mark Becks: Thanks, everyone. Melinda, Bob and I will be in our offices today to take any questions that we didn’t get into on the call. Thanks, and have a great day.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

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